Gentoo Linux tells AI-generated code contributions to fork off
- Reference: 1713292212
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/04/16/gentoo_linux_ai_ban/
- Source link:
A ban on AI-made code was originally [1]proposed on February 27 by Michał Górny, a member of Gentoo's council, an elected committee that governs the Linux distro. Górny argued for an AI ban for three major reasons: potential copyright infringement, quality control issues, and ethical considerations over AI's high power consumption and the role of major corporations in shaping the technology.
Copyright is certainly becoming a chronic issue for AI models, which may or may not be trained on protected materials, with [2]Nvidia one of the latest companies to be sued. AI is also known to produce nonsensical text and code, and has even been observed to [3]hallucinate entire software packages.
[4]
Beyond banning AI code submissions, Górny said he also wanted Gentoo to offer something unique for the Linux community.
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"I think it's a good PR move for Gentoo right now," Górny told The Register . "When a lot of projects are being enthusiastic about 'AI,' I feel that many Gentoo users really appreciate the old school approach to software engineering where humans matter more than 'productivity.'"
The ban and its proposal were preemptive and not the result of any specific incident in the Gentoo community. "We are taking early precautions," Górny explained.
AI is fully banned, but probably not forever
The council [7]originally discussed Górny's proposed ban on March 10 at its scheduled monthly meeting. However, no action was taken since the wording of the ban wasn't yet formulated and many council members wanted to hash out more details. The ban was finally enacted during the [8]council's meeting on April 14, where it passed six to zero, with one member being absent from the vote.
[9]AI gold rush continues as Microsoft invests $1.5B in UAE's G42
[10]AI cloud startup TensorWave bets AMD can beat Nvidia
[11]OpenAI launches Asian operations in Tokyo to avoid being lost in translation
[12]What's up with AI lately? Let's start with soaring costs, public anger, regulations...
"My personal opinion is that we're just starting with the topic," Górny said. "I suspect we're going to see more user feedback when we actually announce it properly, and users learn about it."
The Gentoo community had discussed the potential ban in email threads and IRC chat rooms, and Górny said there was a consensus that "some restrictions" should be put in place. With the ban in full force, it could encourage more Gentoo community members to share their opinions on AI.
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Of course, enforcing the ban would be challenging; how can someone distinguish between code written by an actual human and one written by a machine? In Górny's view, the effectiveness of the ban isn't really the point.
"Our primary goal is to make it clear what's acceptable and what's not, and politely ask our contributors to respect that," he said, adding that the AI ban is mainly an extension of current rules on copyrighted code.
"If we receive contributions that contain really 'weird' mistakes, the kind that doesn't seem likely to be caused by a human error, we're going to ask questions, but I think that's the best we can do," Górny added.
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However, the ban explicitly includes a clause that states the policy can be revisited in the future, an addition that some council members explicitly asked for. "Things may have changed a lot (or not at all) by a year, as things are moving quickly," council member Sam James said.
The council has already foreseen a future case where they make an exception for AI – a model trained specifically on Gentoo. This would (in theory) eliminate concerns over copyright infringement, and could potentially result in higher quality code. ®
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[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org/msg99042.html
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/authors_file_lawsuit_to_torpedo/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Zh709mNYAFNNiIQjz-Fd6gAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zh709mNYAFNNiIQjz-Fd6gAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zh709mNYAFNNiIQjz-Fd6gAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20240310.txt
[8] https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20240414.txt
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/microsoft_g42_investment/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/amd_tensorwave_mi300x/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/openai_tokyo_office/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/15/stanford_report_ai/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Zh709mNYAFNNiIQjz-Fd6gAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Zh709mNYAFNNiIQjz-Fd6gAAABg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
AI won't get you bug-free code without several humans going over the code the AI wrote.
These guys were doing summits of AI made crao without doing quality control.
AI won't get you bug-free code without several humans going over the code
You can't get bug-free code that way either. Humans are just as unreliable sometimes.
The best way to achieve bug-free code is to ban AI LLMs from creating code in your project.
First of all, writing code is considerably easier than reviewing code. With LLMs you can hope to automate the easy bit while making the hard bit harder because there is nobody to ask why they chose to do X two months ago. Also, there will be either zero documentation, unintelligible documentation, or plain wrong documentation.
Secondly, LLMs are currently pretty poor at writing code. LLMs have no intelligence, they just rehash what they have found elsewhere. Their proposed code is therefore full of ancient code styles that have long fallen out of favour, full of approaches that were thought to be safe fifteen years ago but have long since been replaced by better practices, or approaches that have never been safe but just worked (as in: passed a functionality test) in a time when security was an afterthought.
And that's just the coding. At the moment Open Source projects (and probably closed source projects too but they won't tell us) are bombarded with ChatGPT gibberish masquerading as bug reports because people want to achieve kudos, or get a bug bounty. Just spray and pray GPT diarrhoea at dev teams and see what sticks. At the moment LLMs are hard at work making software quality worse.
I'm not saying LLMs (or even AI at some point) can never play a role in serious quality software development (I can see how it could theoretically work but the snake oil salesmen have no incentive to focus on quality) but I suspect that is a good few years off. If it ever happens.
"Górny argued for an AI ban for three major reasons: potential copyright infringement, quality control issues, and ethical considerations over AI's high power consumption and the role of major corporations in shaping the technology."
Surely if power consumption were really a huge issue for the Gentoo team they would also look at how their distro operates? As running a system with Gentoo means your using more power to install and update a Gentoo system over something like RHEL or Ubuntu. Since with Gentoo you have to compile most apps yourself from source which means your CPU load is higher, the system draws more power and needs to be running for longer than if you were just downloading a precompiled binary.
FYI i do have a system that runs Gentoo at home, which acts as a freeview DVR, so i know how long an update can take to do.
"I feel that many Gentoo users really appreciate the old school approach to software engineering where humans matter more than 'productivity.'"
I'm not sure what they've swallowed but I think most people are more interested bug-free code regardless of how it came about.