GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.
AI is evil.
It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.
The association has been made and it is not going away.
AI in concept is not evil and could be a good thing .
Unfortunately, its implementation has been at the hands of rapacious, avaricious, and narcissistic über-capitalists, which has inextricably linked AI with the evils you enumerated.
In a different timeline, AI was developed slowly, using heavily-vetted and legally obtained data, and rolled out in an intelligent and safe way.
We are better off leaving the appeal to alternate time lines for another conversation, preferably around science fiction or comics.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities.
And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it.
This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, as you very well put it, not done that way.
AI is not evil. It doesn’t have a consciousness. It doesn’t make decisions.
What is evil, are billionaire capitalists having full control over the technology.
What is evil, is the concept of closed-source.
What is evil, is stealing all creative works without attribution or compensation.
What is evil, is seizing essentially all the silicon to build these datacenters, then soak up all the electricity out of the grid and all the water out of the ground.
The problem isn’t the AI, itself. It’s the means that’s the problem…not the ends.
To summarize: something that is being created through highly destructive amd predatory means, by completely deranged people, is not evil.
I can’t disagree more. And to quote myself, again, today:
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
this is such an extremist position, i don’t know how anyone can take it seriously
Never been on the Fuck AI communities? They all think like that.
And like everything in life, things are a lot more nuanced.
Thank you.
“Ai” isn’t inherently evil. It’s just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.
What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they’re 90% bullshit and harmful.
But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don’t really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even “techies” don’t get, so why should a layman.
Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it’s not THAT bad anymore.
“AI is just a tool” - #1 thing said by tools.
“AI is just a tool” - #1 thing said by tools.
#1 thing said by arrogant turds with no clue.
My point proven :D
If that fills your clueless heart with joy, be my guest 🤷🏻
I’m just going to quote myself, as I’m satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
“I’m just going to quote myself”
Yeah go on buddy, doesn’t make you right though.
AI is an item (as “tool” seems to trigger you people), saying it is “evil” is just stupid and makes you sound like an evangelist lol.
Is it bad? That is something people can actually discuss, but you’re not here for that it seems.
The AI is a consummer of resources we can not easily dispense that returns nothing of objective and equivalent value.
Fresh words, no quotes.
More palatable now?
Oh no we didn’t know that!! /s
Dude, we know the downsides of generative AI and the training of llms.
Is that so hard to understand?
It is. It really is. At any point on any other endeavour, someone said it was enough and the costs did not justify the results. Not with this. So, it really is hard to understand.
Just because it was a nicely worded statement, doesn’t make it universal.
I use a local LLM for our smart home. It wastes a Lil bit of energy, which is still faaaar below my 1500W while gaming. Is gaming evil now? It helps dramatically in ways that were never possible before like “turn on all lights at 40% in the color purple and also turn on music. My fav playlist” followed by a “no, use a warm color and close all windows”.
Not every LLM is a fucking chatbot that eats the planet to “create” a shitty cat-meme for Granny’s Facebook.
Don’t assume everyone uses silly chatbots. That is ONE application of LLMs, and it is indeed stupid and kills out environment for basically no benefit.
Congratulations. Enjoy it.
The problem you’re encountering is that every human defines evil differently. Those disagreeing with you seem to define evil to include “detrimental to civilized society”, which does at least come from an objective premise, even if you don’t agree with the assessment.
Through that lens, the good it does for people simply cannot outweigh the bad, because they believe the bad to include the end of society. That is what you’re arguing against, and why people with that view are so energized and are unmoved by the counter-arguments. If you want to change their minds, you would first have to convince them their premise is false, not just their conclusion.
Well, tbh, if someone has an opinion that isn’t swayable by facts, why should I take that person seriously? It’s like talking with religious nutjobs. They already have all “answers”.
The facts are clear, relatively simple, and accessible by everyone. And “evil” is generally considered bad. But LLMs are not just “that precise one thing” that could be declared evil. It’s a concept. The application of it changes the good/evil attribution. Chatbot? Obviously bad. Helping to determine cancer in a Patient? Good. Etc.
If people don’t WANT to argue because they already joined a “AI is the devil”-cult, so be it. Not my job to convince anyone of anything 😊
Their opinions may be swayable by facts, but not just any facts. You would need to present facts that confirm that their specific objections are unfounded or overblown.
Facts like “its here to stay” and “it allows you to write more code in less time”, etc, do not address their objections. Stating to them the ways in which it is good does nothing to counter their conception of the ways in which it is bad.
And that’s the nonsense about it. We’re not talking about cars or such, but a general concept. And most likely take one or two specific applications of it and use it as a definition of the thing itself. And even with cars you couldn’t condemned them because tanks exists, and ignore ambulances or such.
Also, it’s usually the exact same group that also mostly uses products of what they hate so much. Microsoft, google, Facebook or any us-american bigtec. If LLMs would be as bad as they say it is, stop funding it. Simple. Really really simple. I don’t use any of those, so it’s possible to actually protest besides big word and vote by wallet.
What? So I use my Intel B70 to help code a useful application. Maybe use a half kilowatt to do so. Play a game for an hour you’d use the same.
The current crop of AI companies are doing what you hate, not AI.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS Here you go, argue with GrapheneOS - it’s an open platform, go ahead and make a masto account and share your thoughts with them. Tell them what you think! The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
Yeaaaah like deleting their earlier posts to make themselves look better and claiming the “haters” are coming from K*wi Farms.
https://mas.to/@zzt/117246306723269935
Truly good rebuttals right here!
I’m not going to approach them in any fashion. I have already made my decision about their work/product and the GrapheneOS is not of my interest.
The project must have their reasons but I still insist on what I’ve stated regarding AI in general.
You’re right, but don’t encourage people to brigade GrapheneOS. That’s a donation-funded project.
I’m not brigading anyone. They have their reasons, I have my view regarding AI, that is it. I did not attack the GrapheneOS team in any way nor do I intend to.
My bad, I didn’t think of that. My only thought was “$20 says this chucklehead won’t do squat” because we know.
If they’re just using it to find and patch bugs/exploits? Fine by me.
Vibe coding? Get the fuck outta here.
This is the key point.
From my reading that is not the limit in how they are using AI. It seems like they are accepting LLM generated code as inputs.
This pretty much compromises the whole project as far as I am concerned.
Considering Graphene’s entire reputation is staked on extremely precise definitions of security, this is a little concerning.
They’re the “best” (read: most secure) mobile operating system. If the best degrades, I don’t foresee some Graphene alternative stepping up very quickly (see also: cross-platform alternatives to Google-made Chromium and Google-funded Gecko)
is the linux kernel “the best”? because they are using AI tooling. Linus actually threatened to use LLM to maintain sparse if nobody stepped up…
is curl the best? because the creator of curl has also used/accepted LLM code…
if the creators of two of “the best” pieces of software ever made are accepting (NOT embracing or promoting… just accepting) LLM code… maybe it’s time for us to think about the possibility that this MIGHT be a useful tool instead of everyone just yelling “SLOP SLOP SLOP” everywhere…
Someone commented on here the other day that they don’t use anything that uses AI. I had to point out that they were on Lemmy, in a contemporary web browser, connecting to a Linux server running inside of a docker container. I’m still not sure if they understood my point, but I’m glad someone else on here is seeing the ripple effect.
People trusted Linux to be better than Microsoft Windows, and saw the effect of a company with tons of money and first-class AI access exponentially worsening their product.
It has been disappointing to see people like Linus Torvalds turn aggressive against people who do not agree with his ideology, and I find it distasteful for you to use reductive attacks against strawmen as well.
Where is he aggressive? What ideology?
The only ideology linus follows is “dont break userspace”
“Aggressive” is how I understand the language of someone who attacks “natural intelligence” and promises to “very loudly ignore” the people he deems "social warrior"s and “religious” for not agreeing with his opinions, telling anyone who disagrees with him to “look in the mirror”.
If it’s thoroughly vetted, it might still be OK, but it’s concerning…
Based on my understanding, the “core” team uses AI to detect vulnerabilities.
They also take codes from paid third party devs, and they say they don’t mind how they wrote the code, but it must be clear and each contributor needs to be able to explain it.
They follow the same rules on code conventions including readability. So basically, it’s less that they accept it than they don’t care as long as it matches their quality expectations. If you can’t tell, you can’t ban…
I’d argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?
My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is “not a user” and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.
Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.
I don’t use Discord myself, but I think their decision to use Discord is defensible even if I find it distasteful. Their support chat isn’t meant to be a private space. (People discussing crimes and whatnot on Discord are using poor judgement.)
I think what they are trying to say there is that there is a lot of negative commentary on the Fediverse coming from people who are not users, and that they are not really beholden to those commentators. And that’s true. They don’t really have a history of smooth PR as far as I can remember.
I also think whether their acceptance AI usage is an overblown issue or not is completely unrelated to that comment, so I’m not sure why it would change your opinion of it.
Matrix is the proper space for a privacy focused community. Discord as an application is privacy invasive and requires ID to be provided. This has nothing to do with a public community not being private. It’s the wrong technology choice for what they claim to be focused on and there is no getting around that.
Discord does not require an ID unless the space you’re trying to access is marked as adult only. This obviously does not apply to a tech support community. But like I said, yeah, it’s not what I would choose. What’s your point? Graphene OS is suspect because they don’t choose your favored chat platform? And like i said, this has nothing to do with whether or not the acceptable use of AI assistance was overblown.
I did not see those comments, if that’s true, it’s definitely strange.
Exactly this. As much as I hate the current AI scenario across the board, the GOS team has shown, time and again, that they are stellar developers and coders, that they genuinely care about security, and that they are the best at countering anti-privacy on the technology front.
If any team can use AI responsibly to improve all this, it’s the GOS team. And if it ends up failing on it’s face, I expect them to move away from it if things go south. Now, if they don’t because of ‘AI addiction’, then I will be looking at what my alternative options are. Until them, I’m 100% with them, as they have not given me any reason yet to doubt their judgement.
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
It exclusively comes from either snake oil vendors or people who are less smart than they think they are. Where the former are typically part of the latter group.
You cannot put the evils back into Pandora’s Box when it was already open.
Even if these companies sink, individuals can still use their own hardware for AI. Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
Sure you can. Because in this case Pandora’s box is something which exists solely through a sustained, inconceivable amount of money being continuously funneled into it without any guaranteed long term benefit to the people who do so. It’s a technology which isn’t sold as a product as it exists in its current form, but a theoretical future form.
If the bottom were to fall out from under it tomorrow, it couldn’t even continue to exist as it is now, it would disappear entirely as there would be no financial incentive to keep it running. Individuals could still run what we have now offline, but its value and usefulness would degrade rapidly as time went on, because it relies on mass-scale power consumption and data theft to remain up to date, much less improve.
Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
stop. calling. slop. ai. It’s a shitty subcategory of it. Just like actual dog poo is a subcategory of organic chemical compounds.
At the very least, you’d have to convince both the US and China to stomp it out. And then there are other countries that would be willing to pick up the slack.
AI is not something self sustaining enough to necessarily require stomping out, at least that we know of at this point. Right now AI’s future relies on its operators continuing to convince people of a theoretical future scenario.
GOS is not part of a theoretical future.
It’s not going anywhere because it’s already been here for a very long time, you just didn’t know about it
What people call “AI” is just Machine Learning.
Chatbots, OCR, Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, Computer Vision, Web Search, Spam filtering or Fraud detection, Personalized ADs, even your phone’s camera processing algorithm.
It’s all Machine Learning, but now under new and fancy “AI” name. And it’s been here for decades.
The reason it blew up this much only now is because people realized that the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes. And so they started exploring it more, to the extent of causing valid ethical concerns.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere. But it’s clear from the context here what we’re referring to when we say AI in this conversation.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere.
As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you’re correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.
Finally, someone gets it!
Instead of going away, the AI will transform. It’s sort of in a bubble state rn. Once it pops, the fields where it’s useful will keep on using it, whilst those applications that have no real grounds for existing will either have their plugs pulled or resources cut.
Apparently, not to me. Explain.
Edit: Downvoting a person for asking clarification? Shame on you lot.
Here’s a starting-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Pointing to a wiki page instead of actually explaining stuff isn’t going to change my mind.
Now, if you’re talking specifically about LLMs, however (which you could’ve just said so, ffs). I think their scope of application and resources wasted on them will be significantly reduced. Look at what happened to blockchains and NFT. Basically, I expect the same to happen here.
Nobody is trying to change your mind. You’re just immune to context clues lol
the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes.
And that’s bullshit. The slop machines have already peaked. More input will not improve the results.
Not compared to models from 00s or 10s…
What’s with the reading comprehension, people? I was talking about pre-AI boom vs. now, not now vs. 1-2 years ago, c’mon.
LLMs use a new way of data processing (focused on language rules) which is what brought the boost. Not more training data. More training data is needed for an LLM to reach “maturity” but it also increases cost due to resource usage. And current LLMs have already absorbed basically all of the internet and most books, and since the internet is now full of slop, more unpoisoned training data does not exist. That’s why more does not help anymore.
Touché
I don’t need to be skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
AI is the stolen collective labor from all of humanity, thrown into a blender with magic mushrooms and LSD, then locked behind a paywall and operating out of massive datacenters, thats destroying communities and the planet and undoing 40 years of efficiency and environmental gains.
I dont need to be a skilled engineer, a brilliant software developer, or anything else, to know thats bad, and that every single cunt piece of shit that enables it, defends it, and worst of all, uses it are, at the very most positive outlook at it possible, thieves who are willing to sacrifice actual human life, just so they can generate a random emulsion of coding (in this case, or in other cases generate images of nude children, celebrities, your mother, or tell people on the brink of psychosis that they are actually jesus, or any of the other vile evil shit that it does) that might function, at the expense of actual human labor and well being.
And every single motherfucking one of them that make that decision deserve convicted, and to be hung from a tree.
That’s the communication problem in these conversations. Whether it’s a useful tool and whether it’s an ethical tool are two different questions. People come in and attack the developers for generating slop, and they respond that they are experienced developers who can use the tool properly to increase the security of the code or whatever. And the conversation here is about that.
And then someone like you comes in talking about ethics, which is what we should be talking about, but we are talking past each other.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
I don’t need to be skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions.
You are both correct. But the former is about the engineering, the latter is about ethics. You do need to technically skilled to evaluate whether AI is a useful tool for Graphene. You don’t need to in order to critique it on ethical grounds. These are completely different topics that have nothing to do with each other.
the only people getting a net use out of LLM garbage are sub-par programmers. and I say that partially as a self burn because I have consulted slop chatbots to get some keywords / usage examples for functions I didn’t know yet. Even though I never used any drop-in code, and verified the usage of all that I “learned” from such conversations, the output was incredibly shitty and had to many holes in it that most people wouldn’t even spot because “it just works”. Using slop bots in coding / vibe-coding is offloading your incompetence as work onto future programmers.
no, we are not talking about two different things.
We are talking about one single thing.
the theft of human potential for profit, and the sacrifice of the world for the enrichment of the few due to exploiting that theft.
You are just trying to play word games and split the discussion to defend the indefensible.
Lol you are so argumentative that this is how you respond to someone agreeing with you? Forcibly putting me into the “opposing camp” against my will. All right then, live your delusion while we fight AI without you.
Calling for the murder of other people in a public forum is never wise. At best, you could (should) be permanently banned. At worst, police could show up at your house and lock you away forever (the world would be better place for it!).
Removed by mod
So, username checks out…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
Aaaand just like that you disqualified yourself from having an opinion worth listening to on what “insanely talented engineers” are.
I’m anti-WhateverTheBillonairesArePushing. And by golly are they pushing AI.
GrapheneOS is using AI models to find vulnerabilities before others do. The Bitcoin Red Team did the same and found an absolute ton.
I hate the AI bubble, but they’re forced to use AI to defend against AIm
And by-golly are they pushing AI.
What, you mean this fantastic enthusiasm isn’t entirely organic?
Even a broken clock is right 2 times a day though.
Would you care about AI if it wasn’t pushed by billionaires?
The only other entity able to push AI this hard is the state, and people would certainly be just as pissed about it.
You shouldn’t let billionaires control your life. They may not have your best interests at heart.
deleted by creator
There really is a difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and I don’t know enough about actually coding to look at their repos and tell you what’s happening.
“AI-assisted” will inevitably turn into AI-generated over time as the babysitters get complacent.
The issue is, there’s also difference between how people cram “AI-assistance” into their previously well-refined workflows. Did see the odd person ending up with the same issues as straight-out vibe coding but without the speed, including the eventual (mild) AI psychosis and later switching to vibe coding after the chatbot convincing him.
Also I think it would be pretty trivial to generate an “understanding” of the code, yet AI boosters never bring up it as a concern.
A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I’m the only one left that is:
- Using small, open-weight models
- Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
- Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.
I feel like when we’re talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it’s not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn’t find this problematic?
Probably.
My company is currently pushing “loop engineering” on us… They are in love with Claude and keeps referring to it as “him”. Very proudly announce that “I set ut a loop, and he closed 40 PRs while I slept!” (without review, of course). Based on vibe written tickets as well, which contains many hallucinations.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
Things like this radicalize people against all AI.
We usually say “the other guy”, or sometimes we say “I & AI” (a poor twst on a Rastafarian saying)
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
I’d hand in my resignation…
I’m actively looking for another job, had an interview yesterday, crossing my fingers!
Best of luck!
Thank you! 😁
I prefer it less for the writing part (unless big refactors that aren’t actually complex) and more for analysis. If you got a couple million lines of code upstream that you depend on heavily (ERP modules) then it’s nice to fire off a prompt and come back to “you got weird behavior x because upstream changed y, here’s the exact file and lines and how it flows there”
No, there are plenty on the left doing exactly that. Plenty don’t mention it because there’s been so much AI pushback they don’t want to be written off, others don’t mention it because they know it doesn’t really contribute to the conversation most times. It’s unlikely that your use is reflective of most AI use in these large projects.
Realistically, even your use doesn’t address some people’s issues. People dislike that the training data was used without consent, that’s not really addressed by open weight models. You checking and understanding the output is great, but a lot of people take issue with having offloaded that to the AI in the first place. Maybe your use doesn’t have the same negative environmental impact as some of the other models, but I’m not sure it really matters. If we’re using AI then inevitably some outputs will have larger environmental impact than others.
I am not saying your AI use is the problem with humanity or anything, but no, you’re not alone. Most people just aren’t talking about people like you and your specific situation doesn’t actually fully address people’s issues with AI regardless.
I have occasionally used anonymous browser sessions in the way you describe, and I still feel dirty for it and think it’s problematic. It did not affect the quality of my code because I never did the 2nd bullet, I never asked for drop-in code or used any, but the ethical implications suck donkeyballs so I hate that I do this occasionally - I blame really bad documentation of some build environments.
As long as you have an understanding of what you’re copying and pasting, your fine IMO.
I don’t like GOS devs, they are not focused on usablity, but on security (which is completely valid, but it’s a shame that GOS is the most usable mobile OS), but holy based.
If you are disputing AI utility in coding: Recent Linux kernel versions fixed up to 3 times more CVEs in comparision to releases before AI. Also, much less of those CVEs are found in the newer versions, which means new kernel releases contain better code.
I dont think those arguing in good faith dispute its utility, they dispute the cost-benefit assessment of those using it.
If someone, for example, made a tool that produces something of objective value every time you feed it an orphan, it has undeniable utility but many would refuse to use it on moral and ethical grounds.
That’s obviously a hyperbolic example, but the logic behind it is sound and what the detractors are using to make their assessment. LLMs do something useful, but are grievously inefficient on every resource except time, when compared with traditional methods of doing the same thing. That trade-off is unacceptable to many, especially with the backdrop of the planet’s ecosystem rapidly dying.
I think the gist here is making a distinction between AI coding and AI auditing.
To the best of my knowledge, AI coding is still significantly behind human coders in code quality and security. AI auditing, on the other hand, allows a lot of previously missed bugs to come to light, and actively helps in making code better.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all. Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code. LLMs are SO on steroids (actually trained on SO topics). So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source. Also: if OSS community did not use AI it would hardly stop it from continuing it’s growth in Enterprise. So there’s not much of a winning strategy there either.
Which brings us to GrapheneOS decision and given above reasons I think it’s a well-balanced decision.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.
This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of “brain hacks” - no, this isn’t hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are “addictive by design”.
Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.
Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like “what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour”.
Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.
ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.
So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.
First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.
But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.
Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon’s law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).
There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)
But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.
Agree 100% I was about to mention training the LLM on decompiled binaries, but you mentioned that too. I guarantee the Chinese models are already doing it.
Another thing is I think one can analyze binaries (decompiled or not) to extract control structures in machine code or byte code to control flow graphs. Using some classical pattern matching, that should not be too difficult because the number of ways compilers transform code like loops are limited. Allowing some degree of fuzziness, I’d often expect these to be very characteristic for the original source of a code piece. That source might often be FOSS code; often an old, vendored version not updated in years.
One could then use standard graph search/fuzzy matching algorithms and graph databases in order to find out which GPL’d open-source code e.g. some proprietary product has included. This would give away potentially vulnerable versions. And it would not necessarily need a lot of computing resources.
I’m just waiting for Microsoft and Windows to get blown wide open by this Pandora’s box they’ve opened.
Is it just a tool really?
Using a hammer doesn’t atrophy the muscle in your arms as you use it.
However using AI has already been shown to atrophy the brain.
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
a lot of communities are aggressively clamping down on AI contributions. i think leaving the floodgates open really hasnt worked out. People touting “the kernel does it so get over it” gloss over the contributions being small and strict “your ai code reflects you and you own the consequences” policy.
additionally i dont buy the enterprise does it so get on board argument. the floss movement is literally built around pushing back on corporate norms. i dont know why anyone would take thay argument at face value.
for a lot of FLOSS communities, the ethics of the software is as important as the quality. which is why so many Debian community members felt betrayed by milquetoast ai policy adoption.
Graphene made a similar “look they’re all doing it too” argument on Mastadon which I feel just really undermines their image as the alternative.
“we dont police our developers usage as long as the quality meets out high standards. all code is at the end of the day ownedand reviewed by the humans in our teams” or some other equally silly statement would still have had critics but at least they wouldn’t sound like a grade schooler wining about how infair life is.
deleted by creator
Yeah, just one small problem, muchacho. Whenever a language recieves a breaking change you gotta retrain the model again, and a lot of your references are useless now. There is no “improving” it’s just a vicious cycle.
Your argument is that of peer pressure and not compelling.
“Join us or we’ll just steal your code anyway”
Here’s my rebuttal. Garbage in, garbage out. Most projects out there are trash. This tool doesn’t help you build good code, it helps you throw together a pile of trash. An actually helpful LLM would be one trained on the damn language itself and coding best practices. Almost everyone has lost the plot here. You DON’T want a massive LLM, the small specialized ones are good enough. So you can use it as auto complete, like the tech was intended.
You’ve made a few of erroneous conjectures which are orthogonal to my argument. But I’ll call out one: LLM is bad at code completion and it’s use not have to be limited to (final) code writing. Thus my theses on “what” vs “how”
Give me a break. Put down the thesaurus. You are the reason LLMs are so.useful. because, as one searches for a solution to the update that borked one’s servers, we find that 4 out of 5 forum threads on your topic devolved into jerks weaving unhelpful riddles, smelling their own farts and feeling superior.
LLM is just fine for next text prediction, in the same way my phone keyboard can sometimes guess what I’m about to say. But the notion of building this huge mass is where I draw the line, it’ll never be finished. Does overfitment mean nothing to anyone anymore?
your points support my statement though: how vs what is the real question here. LLM is fine performing repetitive mundane tasks that we find boring and uninteresting. Like refactoring small chunks of code out or “search and replace” when context matters more than matching string etc. Also, let’s assume someone had enough bitcoin mining gear laying about to repurpose it into LLM training infra and trains his/her small model on stuff they care for, suddenly we lose all the other arguments and use of LLM becomes more acceptable. So blanket ban at this point is not going to achieve any of the goals, really. Consider that majority of developers were mandated to use LLMs for work, consequently their skill shape changed, for project to draw from that pool of developers you need to offer comparable tools.
Context matters too: Graphene has to deal with AOSP, which lost it’s development transparency a while ago and Graphene developers likely have to contend with big (likely LLM-generated) code dumps within mainline AOSP with each new release, so to keep up with that onslaught they either need to expand developer base (and we just said that pool is shrinking) or leverage LLM to cut through that mess. Again “how” tool is used matters a great deal.
When people say they don’t want AI in their codebase, they’re talking about Claude, and GPT. I mean, we’ve had intellisence for ages. To a certain extent, we’re both fighting strawman arguments.
I get your point now, but I’ve personally had about 6 of my projects at work ruined due to AI slop, to the point that I don’t think my company is going to make it. I’m the odd one out, everyone else is loving it, despite our productivity grinding to a hault.
Oof. Options for good software grows smaller and smaller each day.
Reading the comments, wow AI is polarizing. Neither side will budge.
I guess only time will tell, to see if all the AI code will actually come crashing down.
good to see smart developers posting reasonable takes, though sad they have to spend time doing it
People still seem to think AI is a fad that will go away. I don’t see this happening (for code) at all. Not ever
People don’t really understand this yet. There are LLMs that can do useful work running locally on 5 year old laptops (ok, only if it’s a Macbook Pro, but still). Qwen on consumer hardware isn’t close to Claude Code using cloud models, but it can do real work and this is the floor, the absolute minimum of AI we will have going forward. No matter what happens to the industry and the bubble, it will not go away. With any other outcome other than a total collapse of the bubble, AI will be more powerful than that.
Like every other recent bubble, the output is not monolithic and uniform. Like all before it, all the stupid/silly/wasteful use cases will dry up, and something will remain, but nothing like what we see at the apex of the hype cycle.
See the dot-com and crypto bubbles for the most directly applicable examples. Both yielded useful technological advancements still in use today, but those are only a fraction of a speck of a ghost of the use cases being touted at their peak.
Well capitalism is based on unethical practices so what’s the point of striving to be ethical!!!
Is what I’m reading
Well capitalism is based on unethical practices so what’s the point of striving to be ethical!!!
Is what I’m reading
I am reading the same. A variation of “everyone’s doing it, why should I act ethical?” Fuck them.
The thing about tools is they do what you expect. A fork picks up food. A hammer’s head doesn’t suddenly change shape or fly off. I don’t have to worry about my shoes suddenly falling apart.
AI cannot do these things, but encourages you to use them in such a way that you don’t have to oversee the output.
It is so much more work to rewrite something that has already been written poorly. It takes more time and effort than to just rewrite it from scratch. It’s not a tool as it cannot do its job. On top of that it’s just a glorified collage machine pulling code or whatever it wants from its database and smashing it together. The code is not novel or genuine.
All of that rework and it still destroys the environment and communities wherever their data centers are housed. Loud noise and now Americans don’t have the right to clean water. They’re pissing in your yard and telling you to drink it up.
Please have a spine. Or just some pride.
They’re using AI models to find vulnerabilities. I assume the fixes are human written.
You never used any software?
They are tools like any other. But bugs exist, and will cause it to perform in ways you don’t expect.
Your analogy is wank, is what I am saying.
There is no making ai go away, it’s never going away. Now it’s a tool to divide us.
