Hi Lucas and everybody else, Quoting Lucas Nussbaum (2026-07-30 09:16:14) > On 30/07/26 at 07:48 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > > But I > > think it became clear from the other mega-thread that there are a lot of > > people > > with very strong feelings about this topic. In fact, their feelings are > > apparently so strong that they open the big can of worms that is a GR, we > > spend > > a *lot* of our time on very difficult discussions and we risk a hard > > division > > of our community or even some of our members leaving. That's tough stuff. > > Apparently, some in our community feel strong enough about this topic that > > they > > are willing to risk all of that and put so much trouble on their fellow DD's > > limited Debian time. Even if this whole LLM topic is fine for you, you > > probably > > see that this would not've been made into a GR if some of our friends would > > not > > feel *very* strongly (as in: badly) about that topic. > > This paragraph works both ways: > Some of us are also convinced that AIs is fundamentally changing > software engineering, and want to use that technology in the context of > Debian, to the point that they would lack motivation to continue working > on Debian if it was not possible.
my paragraph was meant in the context of the Debian related work we do right now. I am not using LLMs to do anything Debian related and I fail to come up with anything that my refusal to use LLMs could result in you feeling bad over my work. Me not using LLMs likely does not make you feel bad. You using them for tasks like your initial mail makes me feel bad. This is of course my own problem and I have to deal with it somehow but that's what I meant when I tried to describe this asymmetry. > I think that the key question, that is not completely addressed so far, > is: can we find a middleground that allows pro-AI and anti-AI > contributors to continue working reasonably healthily together? > > I am sure that many of us care more about Debian, than about their > personal absolute freedom to use AI the way they want, or about their > personal absolute freedom to never ever be exposed to AI outputs. So > maybe there's a way to build better ballot options that seek more > consensual ways of working together while accomodating some/most of the > needs of both camps. > > That's why I've been (perhaps naively) trying to do with Proposal B. I don't think you've been "naively" doing it. I think it's good that you added a ballot option including the things which are of value to you. And I also think that your contribution to this topic has been constructive. I also agree that even though I really, really dislike the way our society is going with respect to its use of LLMs, I care about Debian so much that "some" allowed LLM use would be fine for me and would not make me leave the project. Working together in a consensual way is maybe a key point here and I like that your GR ballot includes point 4 about disclosure. That and other points of your ballot option make it better for me than the status-quo where we do not have the requirements which your ballot option presents and thus I'm likely going to put it above NOTA. I have strong feelings about LLMs but I am willing to make compromises. This discussion (including your input) has challenged my understanding on this topic already and I have shifted my opinion on some areas. So thank you for your input! > For example, we have been discussing disclosure of AI use. Some > proposals require it, some only encourage it. But would it > be better for anti-AI contributors if we discouraged it, to avoid > putting emphasis on AI? On the technical level, I think that's a bad > idea, but maybe it's a good one on the social level. In my opinion: please keep disclosing your use of LLMs. That is (and I feel bad having read this) *unless* you fear that disclosing this information would subject you to harassment from others. I would trust anybody's judgement on where to draw the line in a way that would make them feel more safe from harassment. > > Lucas, I'm not mad at you. I now know from your messages to the list what > > your > > position is and I respect that. And I can understand that with that position > > toward AI/LLMs it felt okay for you to send this message. I still think > > that it > > lacked a bit of empathy towards people like, for example, me who feel bad > > inside every time they see this kind of thing on our MLs (for reasons which > > are > > out-of-scope of the topic about which I want to write about in this email). > > I'm interested in understanding how you would have preferred this > message to be written. I completely hear the point about empathy, but > I'm really not sure that adding a paragraph in that direction would have > helped (also, I'm not sure adding adding such paragraphs in the preamble > of each AI-assisted contribution would be efficient on the long term). > My strategy was "disclose, factually, the use of AI as early as possible > so one can stop reading and avoid feeling tricked about reading AI > outputs", but I can see how it can feel harsh. > > So, is there a way to accomodate most of the needs of both camps? Sorry, I explained myself poorly there. Your message was fine (for me). I like that you disclose your use of genAI and your disclosure of your prompt. I have read your SPEC.md and you have clearly put a lot of work into this. I don't want to belittle that work. Your SPEC.md has been useful to me for example because of the 12 bullet points which I can use to rate my own understanding of each ballot entry. So what I would've preferred is, if you had not spent time on writing this prompt and then send it to some LLM to generate HTML and markdown pages. Your message itself was fine. And here comes the part where I'm struggling to see a way forward to make "both camps" happy. You like to work this way. If you cannot do your work for Debian in that way anymore, I can see how doing work for Debian would be less fun for you and that'd suck. I don't see a good way out where everybody "wins" right now because unless the global landscape changes drastically, I fear I will always cringe a little when a mail lands into my inbox starting with "I used an LLM to generate this and that". I see you saw my "Kitten" example in the other mail. I used this example because I think (hope!) that we can agree that killing baby kittens is really, really bad and we should not be doing that. Going back to being more realistic: if I would now try to weigh costs versus benefits of use of genAI then on the one hand we have for the costs a long list containing items like: all the big and powerful models being owned by billion dollar corporations, big enough to sway politics, big enough to sway public opinion, that make the rich richer (with a surprising number of rich people with clearly anti-democratic fascist view points), the poor poorer (no everybody can be an artist!), support the climate crisis with data centers requiring more electricity than nation states, use and pollute water, requiring supercomputers to train (not something we do as part of a source package build), scraping our web because suddenly everything is free game (server admins hate this trick), making me want to buy faster hardware because my browser has to solve anubis riddles on every website i use, oh no the hardware is now super expensive so you can only afford it if you have enough cash around, the whole copyright dilemma, the whole hallucination issue, the issue with inherent sexism and racism (why are these points so low on my list?), the problem that if the LLM is wrong I cannot "fix it", pushing back on the idea of "free software needs free tools", the deep fakes, the problems for my students with learning because the LLM just hands them the answer (yes the smart ones will still be smart but many will just not put the effort anymore) and so on... Oh and there is also the small thing of my hobby being replaced by a machine but that issue really pales in contrast to the long list of *real* problems. And on the list of benefits we have, very cynically speaking: it now was much easier to create a 17 kB HTML table. Now you can go and you can challenge any of my points above. And yes, your HTML table will not make the oceans boil or democracy fail. But the things we do do not happen in a vacuum. The things we do influence others and they normalize how all of us (even outside Debian) do things going forward. The free software movement also started small and see where we are now. I would not like this to become another thread where we discuss how local models are more ethical than claude/chatgpt (they are) or how things will be so much more efficient in the future (they probably will be). The point I'm trying to make is this: Most of us are in a very, very privileged position. Many of us can work for Debian because we either have secure jobs where we are paid to do this or because we live a sheltered and financially secure enough life to do this in our free time. Compared to most of us on this planet, we can count us as *extremely* well off. And I understand how for probably all of us, creating software is something very important to us because otherwise we wouldn't put so much of our time into it. But at the end of the day: it's just software. It's just an interesting sequence of zeroes and ones. Being able to produce this sequence faster is a first-world-problem of such a high degree of privilege that it pales against most of the issues I have with LLMs even if all of the issues in my list above would only be half as bad as I think they are. For myself this means that I rather "limit myself" and write software "slowly" or that I don't do some things at all. That way, I'm not part of the problems I see and instead am part of the world that I want to live in. Sorry Lucas that this long (and emotional) mail was now a direct reply to yours. I *highly* respect your work and your technical expertise. Just to affirm, I do not think that you acted in bad faith and I don't think that your messages were written badly. It is useful for me to read your messages. Thanks! cheers, josch P.S.: Thank you for reading this far. I dread writing about topics this large and would like if my involvement in the discussion could be kept to a minimum.
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