Direct link to the LLM Policy Discussion: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/work_items/187
Example of a KDE dev not wanting environmental concerns to play any role, despite KDE having an environmental project:
Devs rejecting any notion of transparency by disclosing AI usage in code submissions (in direct opposition to advice from the FSFE):
And all of this is coming right after the debacle with an AI slop project being allowed to give a presentation at Akademy, and the person asking how this was allowed being blocked by KDE:
https://lemmy.nz/post/42029517
as well as the discussion thread bringing up legitimate concerns about AI usage being closed:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/sorry-to-bring-up-a-contentious-topic-kde-ai-llm-policy/46333/164
As someone who genuinely loves KDE, and has even donated to the project multiple times, I sadly have to accept that the majority of KDE have hopped onto the Pro-AI train, and they will not be dissuaded otherwise.
If slop coding is so great why is everyone so adamant about hiding it from users?
If you’re not willing to disclose something, maybe take that as a hint.
I feel like using ai is like using drugs, they’re bad, but regulating them is muuuuuuuch better than just prohibiting, people will use it anyways.
It’s not a one to one comparison but I feel encouraging witch hunts will definitely do more harm than normalizing it.
To be clear, I don’t want it either, I’m acknowledging it’s the lesser of two evils.
As a user, I think this is the biggest issue I have with this policy. Disclosure is a big part of open source and hiding whatever tools are used is fundamentally against that philosophy.
Would you be willing to expand on what you mean by disclosure being a big part of open source?
I ask because it has not been my experience that OSS developers have ever had a habit of disclosing what tools they use. If you are lucky then a repo has instructions for contributors, that may describe tools being used, or CI configuration for running tests and linters, but most projects have neither. Mostly you just get instructions for building the project, but sometimes not even that
Realistically, I think everything actively maintained is going to have some LLM code in it by now. You can either accept it or go mad, tbh.
Art is one thing, and I can see why we wouldn’t want the computer doing that if you have the resources to employ people, but code is rarely art. Most of it was already slop. It’s had things shoehorned into it by shouty managers decades ago. Claude is far from perfect, but so are most of the people doing the gruntwork.
Manager: You have to get this done by end of week…
Dev: itll be really shitty and kind of work. Can we clean it up after?
Manager: of course!
Dev: its done, we can ship it. Ill start cleaning it up.
Manager: No, you need to do this other thing by tomorrow!
Ive had some good ones that did honor the agreement when pushed to rush things, but its not common.
How would you even enforce it. Its possible to make extensive use of local LLMs and have them write no code at all that you submit. Is that use of AI? Should it be disclosed? If you did you would get puritans calling it slop regardless of the result too.
Having an public policy that permits the use of LLMs feels like the opposite of “hiding it”. If a project has such a policy, then you can be pretty sure that LLMs are being used, even if you cannot tell exactly what commits involved the use of LLMs. It’s probably also a lot more discoverable than disclosures in commits or PRs, which most users wouldn’t know how to look for