Lucas Nussbaum <[email protected]> writes: > # General Resolution on AI-Assisted Contributions > > ## Proposal A: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions
I'm afraid this proposal minimises the ethical dimension of using genAI (which I'm going to use as a shorthand for generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude). The organisations developing and marketing genAI are behaving unethically, and it seems to me that they are trying their best to make us all complicit in this unethical behaviour. I think Debian should rather take a clear stand against the use of genAI, and encourage other free software projects to do likewise. The organisations behind genAI have been systematically damaging the wider commons. Almost anyone who runs a website will have horror stories of the damage done by AI scrapers, how they wilfully ignore long-standing conventions to restict automatic scraping (like robots.txt), instead choosing to try and pretend to be real people to make it harder to block them without harming real traffic. They hoover up content as hard as they possibly can, with scant if any regard to its copyright or licencing, instead lobbying to be effectively allowed to do what they like with others' intellectual property. Having DoS'd these sites, the resulting systems attempt to divert user traffic away from them, compounding the harm to the user communities of those websites by drying up the previous supply of new users who previously visited to learn things (and then perhaps stayed to become part of the community). The environmental impact of the rush to build more data centers to house genAI systems is also significant (and negative!), and the knock-on effect on the price of computer hardware is also difficult to ignore. There are plenty of stories of harms caused by using genAI tools, which the creators simply don't care about - from non-consensual nudification to the flooding of free software projects with bogus security reports or "slop" merge requests. It's not clear to me that many of these systems are yet profitable, but rather we are all being encouraged to become reliant upon them - both so we will not stop and question the behaviour of the organisations that are "giving" these tools to us, and presumably so that when the price goes up we will be stuck. I'm also concerned by some of the discourse around adoption as well - "AI isn't coming for your job, people who can use AI better than you are coming for your job" is both trying to cement the idea that genAI is inevitable, and to use fear to make us just use genAI without questioning whether we should. At its best, Debian is a group of people who come together to make the world a better place through free software. I think we should be centering the appalling behaviour of the organisations who are pushing genAI on everyone, and the real harms they are causing; and we should be pushing back on the idea that genAI is either a social good or inevitable. Regards, Matthew -- "At least you know where you are with Microsoft." "True. I just wish I'd brought a paddle." http://www.debian.org
