Hi Johannes, On 30/07/26 at 12:57 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote: > 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 again for this detailed write-up. I think it would be useful to explain how I see AI, and why I'm in the pro-AI camp in this discussion despite acknowledging all the costs that you list. I view the spread of AI we've seen over the past two years as a revolution similar in impact to the generalization of Internet access to the wider public since the mid 90s. Several parallels can be drawn: 1/ There were a few large providers trying to sell a locked-in version of their Internet (AOL, Infonie in France, apparently T-Online in Germany), where real web access was only secondary. At the same time, there were initiatives (some very bottom-up) to empower Internet users to become actors by publishing their own web pages (GeoCities; Mygale or Altern in France). Later, there were also initiatives to build community ISPs, to retake ownership of Internet access. More recently, there have also been initiatives to encourage self-hosting services and counter the SaaS & Cloud worlds. Of course, the landscape of AI corporations is frightening. But there's hope to build alternatives, with open-source agents and open-weight or maybe even open-source models. 2/ Both the Internet and AI dramatically change our access to knowledge. Before the Internet, one had to use super-expensive paper encyclopedias, and there was a real divide between those who had access, and those who didn't. Similarly, AI fundamentally changes our ability to acquire knowledge. Sure, it's not perfect yet. But do you remember the articles claiming that Wikipedia would never match the paper encyclopedias? Also, both challenge teaching and evaluation practices (like calculators before), but that's a pedagogy problem, not a technology problem. 3/ Both seem to involve a financial bubble. My bet would be that the AI bubble will be similar to the Internet bubble: it might burst at some point and kill some companies, but all the solid work that is happening around AI will continue. 4/ Both have a huge impact on society at large, such as jobs getting transformed (for better or for worse), suppressed, or created. This is not just a new technology for our field; this is a technology from our field that has major consequences for society. On your point about privilege: you are right that, today, benefiting from AI is a first-world concern. But the same was true of Internet access in the 90s, and it was democratized over time, and in some ways helped narrow the divide between the first world and the rest. That should be the goal for AI too. Also, it's worth noting that it might be a bit early to weigh costs and benefits of AI. If you look at the Internet again, the technology's "costs" include facilitating [online] harassment, causing or increasing various addictions, causing the control/theft of insane amounts of personal data, facilitating various illegal networks such as paedophiles or terrorists, facilitating misinformation/disinformation, mass surveillance, killing many shops due to online deliveries, concentration of power in big-tech monopolies, massively increasing the digital divide between those privileged with access and the knowledge to use and the rest, environmental cost (datacenters, devices). If we had known all of this 30 years ago, wouldn't it have sounded like a good idea to ban the Internet? One difference with AI is that we seem to have a better understanding of its costs. But that means we are in a better position to work on them and shape the technology early, not that we should ban it. So, despite all the costs you listed, I think that the Free Software community should explore how to build freer, more independent and better AI, even if not everything will be super-free and perfect from day one (after all the Free Software movement wasn't). And in the context of Debian, this means accepting its use so that Debian contributors who want to experiment can do so and contribute to the fight for better AI; this also means understanding where it can help us, what it can bring us, where it fails to deliver, and what are its downsides in our specific context. Lucas
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