As long as they don’t allow AI bots to submit changes, this is probably a realistic decision. Assuming that code generated by AI is never going to be copyrighted by the AI companies. In light of this uncertainty I don’t understand why they don’t require AI code to be flagged as such. That bit seems like a really bad idea, legally speaking.
At first I was afraid that they would allow for an irresponsible use. But no, they explicitly say “responsible”, so that danger is no more. I’m very much relieved.
Also they explicitly mention that humans will remain accountable. Not Nature, or Fate, or the gods; mark that. Good thinking there!
Problems solved.
They basically pass the buck to the individual developer without taking any responsibility themselves.
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material.
The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian.
“It may be illegal or against FOSS, but that’s up to you to decide, good luck I guess”
Good thing I don’t use debian.
i’m actually a little surprised, given their history about being so hardcore about dfsg compliance.
This email from 2016 by jwz springs to mind.
I guess you want Debian to be the kind of operation that uses the work of others while blatantly and explicitly ignoring the wishes of the person who did the actual creative work.
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
Oh no, the people creating free shit for you to use that’s not monetized in any way, want to reduce their workloads. Scum!
You mean the work that that nobody is forcing them to do? The one they do by their own choice while not asking consent and respecting the wishes of others? Yep those devs sound pretty fucking scummy to me.
as a dev I second this opinion.
I was surprised by how many were Trump supporters.
then I was surprised at how many were anti-vax.
now I’m not even surprised.
boooo
Responsible use of llms can’t be achieved. Can you verify that all of your training data are square with its creators? If not, how is that responsible?
It can if you control the training data, or if the data is public domain.
But I get your point. You can say all the Diamonds you use are conflict free, but out of the thousands you have, how do you know some have not slipped in.
At what point do you say you did a good enough job, and at what point is it too contaminated?
Like many things, it difficult to draw a line, so its up to communities to set a reasonable standard.
I think the question can be summarized as “do companies have an obligation of mean or an obligation of result in searching for similar code.”
I unless you have a search engine that can search all code across all repository, public or not, it is pretty hard to ask for an obligation of result.
Moreover, in many countries you cannot copyright the code itself, but you can copyright complete algorithm (RSA would be a good example, but not the code implementation itself), or a specific feature (minigames during loading time).
Note that I do not say itis right to do so, I’m all for opensource softwares, but I take into account that some people make a living from their inventions, so I’m generally in favor of limited copyright protection (in terms of both duration and scope).An invention property, a software engineer code, or anything like that, should be shared by both the inventor (for inventing it in the firstplace), and the one financing it (for paying for it), at least until it pays back the money invested.
I have always thought that copyright on code is a bit pointless. Its like copyrighting engineering formulas and calculations. Given a particular problem, there are obvious solutions. The process should not be copyrightable.
I am also anti-copyrighting of features and ideas.
The only thing that should be copyrightable is the result of an technological or human investment, not the process and method for getting there.
That and copyright protection period should be shorter and non renewable.
I think we mostly agree on that.
Idealy feature or idea shouldn’t be copyrightable, but to acheive that we have to find ways to make sure those who work on those new featurea and idea can live decently.
If you work for years on something new, to see it immediately copied by someone who drown your product with cheaper copies, that’d kinda be disheartening for anyone.
What I think would be ideal would be a standard license fee. One cannot prevent other from copying that idea, but one has to pay a reasonable sum to the owner of the idea until the R&D costs are paid (maybe a bit more so it can grow and invest in costlier invention), after which it becomes public domain.
In all cases, credits are to be given to the inventor, a way or another.
how about making an effort in the first place? to at least make an effort to list all repository thats being used as training data.
Thats a good one. Sounds like a good start for some legislation.
You can’t verify that with humans either. Someone who has seen licensed code, whether proprietary or GPL, will accidentally reproduce snippets of it to accomplish similar tasks in the future.
The problem isnt the fact snippets exist in a codebase. The problem is, the entire fucking website is scraped clean of every codebase that has ever existed without paying a dime to their owner, notifying of their usage, and being transparent of their datasets.
How can it be verifiably responsible if their activity is handwaved under the guise of “business secret”? Its literally people using other peoples work without fair compensation, which means stealing, which means someone has to pay.
Code should’ve never been copyrightable from the start. It’s basically the compute equivalent of a recipe. That aside, almost all modern transformer models are trained on generated data by this point, how would we even apply traditional copyright to that? Whole thing needs tossed and retooled. Entire economic system with it tbh, just slows innovation, and despite what you might believe it doesn’t protect the little guy, it just allows massive corporate conglomerates to buy up everything and control for what will be pretty much the extent of your lifetime.
algorithms and processes are not copyrightable. Code is an expression of algorithms, and thus is copyrightable. If anything, that’s the stance that the entire movements of Free Software and Open Source are going with to function, so this sounds not a good idea even if it is a good ideal.
They’re moving to this as it’s the only defense against oppression, but copy left was intentionally designed to combat copyright because the core founders of open source disagreed with it and the oppression it was causing in the software development community. Imagine if a recipe for Chilli dogs was copyrightable, but not the concept of Chilli dogs. That’s downright silly.
This is good news; Debian is still the way to go for me:
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material. The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works.
In a nutshell, it looks like AI disclosures are encouraged, but not required, and AI usage is encouraged to be human reviewed, but not required. They have also stated they will not allow the use of online AI services for security reasons (but how this will be enforced I’m not sure, since they are relying on the judgement of contributors)
I love Debian. An ol’ rock ballad from the 90s
Dammit. Need to find a new OS.
Linus Torvalds has stated a similar policy for the Linux kernel. If you’re really serious about avoiding the power loom, you have to change the kernel too.
If you want to avoid ai assisted code your only chance is to build a new OS with a new kernel yourself.
True. I’m really not happy with the avalanche of dogshit produced by “AI” though. Maybe I need to find a new hobby.
AI may be the one thing in life I find hard to boycott lmao.
This is like saying “Responsible use of highly infectious diseases.”
Like… In research for vaccines?
Great example. It’s good for that, it must be good universally, so let’s use it for everything. Let’s force people to use it for everything, because it has one legitimate and specific use case scenario.
Yeah, let’s use infectious diseases for socialising with people.
Cough on the face of the person you want to say hello to… Wait… People already do that.
Sanity won imo. We can argue all day about what responsible Ai use is, but distro projects without allowing AI use at all and are serious about it are dead in the water. What were they supposed to d do? Disconnect with upstream?
What were they supposed to d do? Disconnect with upstream?
Use non-slopified alternatives. There are lists such as Open Slopware that document where to get alternatives.
Or just fork the last non-slopified version and work from there. For already-mature software, should not make that much difference in the short term for a distro that seeks out stable long-term behaviour (things would be vastly different if this was Arch).
None of the proposals would have banned AI usage in upstream projects:
It’s not like the Debian policy teams have the power do that to remote dev teams anyway tho. At best they can discard an upstream done with AI.
Yep. There is a middle ground with generative AI and they’ve struck the right balance.
Nooo, you see chosing utilitarian position is a sin.
