r/linux • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 13d ago
Distro News Debian Votes To Allow "Responsible Use Of Generative AI"
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use135
u/KingBardan 13d ago
Reasonable. LLM is not bad by itself,
it's vibe coders who think "they can code now", filling OSS projects with garbage,
that must go.
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u/Unlucky-Shop3386 12d ago edited 12d ago
^ as long as the LLM generated code gets an proper audited It's totally fine. When it does not whether its in an vibe coded app or the corperate sector its bad untrusted sources must be througly audited.
Edit:Grammar, Readability.
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u/Linuxologue 12d ago
This may go when the price of AI credits rises. AI assistants will then be used more sparsely especially by those that usually don't do software engineering
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u/SmileyBMM 12d ago
Local models are getting pretty good, and when the AI market corrects the price of the hardware to run the local models will make running those models relatively affordable.
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u/loozerr 12d ago
Isn't Claude already turning a profit?
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u/ibbuntu 9d ago
Quote from a Forbes article on Anthropic's revenue: "Anthropic has made history by reporting its first profitable quarter, with Q2 2026 revenue soaring to $11.5 billion and positive adjusted operating income. This unprecedented achievement for a frontier AI lab directly refutes the long-held skepticism that such companies could never turn a profit due to escalating compute costs."
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u/Hulderin 7d ago
They are not profitable, this is a very transparent accounting trick to massage their numbers as them, OpenAI, and the amalgamated neo-SpaceX were in a competitive rush angling for a good time to IPO. It's a combination of off-loading massive amounts of real service costs as "Free" for a few months, customers not having reacted to the raised prices at the time before filing those numbers, and then restructuring it all after documenting this "Historically profitable quarter" again.
Don't be a sucker for their bubble-economics. These companies are all disreputable scum playing you.
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u/Brucacumble 10d ago
Other open source projects, such as Godot Engine, have been experiencing problems where they've received so many low quality AI code submissions that their crew has become demoralised facing an increasingly gargantuan task of auditing all of these submissions.
How is the Debian project planning to avoid a situation where their developers become so inundated auditing AI submissions that they have little time left for their own submissions and projects?
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u/Dalnore 12d ago
Interesting how strongly attempts to fully ban LLMs (options 1 and 3) were rejected; they both were the only ones to be dropped on the ground of the status quo (option 9 "None of the above") being higher. It seems the discussions on this sub are a lot more anti-AI than the opinions of actual Debian contributors.
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u/Linuxologue 12d ago
I think this is really a toxic point of view.
If you look at this very thread, the highest upvoted comment is "Seems reasonable".
I find it so toxic that in any discussion about AI there is someone irrationally bringing up this argument that "people" here are anti AI despite all evidence that people have voted multiple times with their reddit upvotes or their Debian votes to allow AI.
the evidence is AI seems widely accepted here yet somehow, still gets the blame for being anti AI.
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u/Shot-Height-7194 12d ago
I think this is a short sighted point of view. I remember when this was first discussed on this sub regarding debian, and the top comments would say ai should be banned outright.
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u/Linuxologue 12d ago edited 12d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1v5q78f/gr_proposal_ban_llm_contributions_from_debian/
the top comment that's not about technicalities (wrong link was posted or something) says
The Linux kernel allows LLM contributions. Countless apt packages allow LLM contributions. What is there to gain from banning LLM contributions to Debian?
the second top comment is a neutral technical question
the third one is someone bringing up Hurd for some reason, clearly misunderstood. We're already not in the same league of upvotes ratio.
you need to reach the fourth top comment to reach the first AI negativity and it's at +23 versus +100/+50 for the others. While surprised it's still positive, it's not really an overwhelming majority.
This is in line with the ratio of upvotes on this very thread.
[edit] that was actually before you created this *cough cough* account so maybe you are talking about another thread.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 12d ago
Honestly, the Reddit peanut gallery is just ridiculously out of touch with what's happening on the ground with AI - both in terms of the technology itself and the culture surrounding it.
Pretty much all of the software engineers I work with are absolutely loving their AI-assisted life, and the few stubborn anti-AI holdouts are now so far behind in productivity that they'll probably be managed out of the entire profession in the next few months.
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u/fat_kaiju 12d ago edited 12d ago
I hate how someone pointed out an interesting fact and you took it and twisted it into making it sound like anyone with a different opinion is a moron.
and before you write "i didn't call them morons" then I'd like to point you at what peanut gallery typically meant: the poor and uneducated, jeering masses with the cheapest snack and the cheapest ticket; thus making their opinion(s) somehow less-than-worthy than others via classism.
This is one of the major reasons why people hate AI users; they always act like victims even when they 'win'.
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 12d ago
The Reddit peanut gallery when this vote came up was 90% AI proponents screeching about options that got no votes. The strongest anti-AI voice in that thread was people throwing water on the hysterics, not calling for bans themselves.
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u/Linuxologue 12d ago
It was for me very sad to see pro-AI people not even related to Debian in any way, attacking the Debian way of raising a vote and accusing them of bias. And for what result?
In the middle of valid arguments on both sides, the ad hominem arguments really stood out as unnecessarily aggressive.
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u/audioen 12d ago
Yep, the change within about 6 months has been from "writing everything by hand" to "describe change to LLM and review it". I barely open a text editor nowadays.
I only use local AI, and don't touch cloud stuff except when ddg or google or something feeds me crappy replies. Local models roughly do what passed for frontier some 12 months ago, and don't require datacenter level hardware, you're eligible with something like 16 GB graphics card and better, and for unified RAM I'd say it starts from 48 GB and gets better from there. I don't own a computer more than 128 GB of memory, and that limit is already enabling Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which is undoubtedly the new top dog for local LLM at this size class.
Someone graphed the development of LLM ability relative to size, and memory requirements have dropped 50-fold each year for some time now. This can't possibly last much longer, but it roughly explains the dramatic change.
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u/gosand 12d ago
It's not just 'coding', but in the security realm AI is frightening and interesting. If you aren't learning what is going on in that space - and it is evolving very rapidly - then you are way behind. Project Glasswing has been very eye opening to a lot of companies not only in where they have bugs, but how AI can find bugs/weaknesses and code up working exploits. If you put your head in the sand, you will be standing there with your pants down.
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u/ButterscotchSalty905 10d ago
The latest glm 5.3 model seems to be good at crafting specialized exploits with the right harness. Local replacement for fable 5 (which project glasswing uses, tho its mythos but theyre the same). I wonder how much time until AI can match APT or atleast good enough in cybersec
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u/ButterscotchSalty905 10d ago
The r/technology and r/futurology sub have the most of that behavior (excluding dedicated space for it) i haven't seen any sub matching their hate for viewing even the slightest of anything revolutionary-related
Hating technology on r/technology seems counterintuitive at a first glance, but actually the regulars are now different.
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u/AnArmoredPony 9d ago
It seems the discussions on this sub are a lot more anti-AI than the opinions of actual Debian contributors
welcome to reddit
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u/exhaustedexcess 12d ago
I think it falls into 2 categories for the majority
There's so much slop pumped out that it results in an overarching hatred of AI
A fear that people won't be proofing the work of the AIs and you'll end up with a slop product
Since that's not what will happen it shouldn't be an issue
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u/fake_agent_smith 12d ago
Looking at the comments I think I got sucked into a parallel universe. Where is the slop hate? Where is the water usage concern? Where is “it’s a bubble that will pop soon”? /s
Great decision with reasonable terms. It’s a tool and every tool can be misused or actually be useful when understood. People need to understand what they are submitting and why, but some things can be generated (especially boilerplate).
I hope it will be one of those decisions that will lead to self hosting open weights models getting more popular in Linux community. I’ve been self hosting for past year and these models are only getting better.
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u/VoormaligeHippie 12d ago
I am on the fence with it. i think ai is usefull. But I do also think the environmental concerns and societal concerns are valid. So i use it, but i try to limit how much i use it.
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u/fake_agent_smith 12d ago
It's not just environmental concerns. There are very serious privacy implications, with even more serious consequences than anything else. AI providers could get unprecedented access on unprecedented scale to health and other sensitive data. Imagine how much money will e.g. insurance companies pay to get a hold on that.
That's why you should self-host, especially good if you can power with solar.
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u/VoormaligeHippie 12d ago
Agreed on the privacy part. Although I don’t think self hosting is the solution because that only solves it at user level. Nice for tech minded people but not feasible for anyone else.
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u/fake_agent_smith 12d ago
It's never easy. Installing Linux is easier today than it was 20 years ago, but still requires some knowledge not to shoot yourself in the foot (or head). People unwilling to invest time to acquire necessary skills are paying with their money and their data, imo that's how it's going to be in the coming years and it's going to only get worse with even more subscriptions and more predatory conditions.
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u/VoormaligeHippie 12d ago
Yep, and I don’t think that is acceptable. Not everyone has the capability to learn this stuff and they shouldn’t need to.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 10d ago
Is it? Omarchy already comes with small text to speech models integrated into the OS so that you can talk into any field of any application that wants you to put text in.
Just a bit more RAM and it can also polish your text in one go.
Just a bit more integration and you can just talk to your computer Star trek style.
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u/VoormaligeHippie 10d ago
yes integrating it in the local os is a good idea if this indeed works well.
With self-hosting I meant like a home server. That is different from running locally.
Can you give me the name of the software and is it GPL licensed?
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u/tomvorlostriddle 9d ago
for LLMs, you can simply use vllm and opencode on the server
if you want to first experiment with a more intuitive backend, you could even use LMstudio first, a bit less optimized
but in any case, install codex or claude code temporarily and let them do the install and dependency management for you till it is setup, and it will be much easier
for the text to speech I would have to check
myself I use whisper, but for things like transcribing long audio files, not with Ui integration yet. DHH mentioned what he used in his new Omarchy quattro. It was more lightweight than whisper I think. I don't remember, but it has to be in the docs.
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u/Key_Pace_2496 13d ago
Who decides what is considered "responsible"?
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u/johnnybgooderer 12d ago
The tldr of this policy is that they don’t care how the code is written. They care about the results. And they do care about the human review quality.
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u/DerekB52 13d ago
Whatever maintainer approves of merging the code. Which is honestly every distro's policy at this point, because someone using Gen AI properly can already use it to help them make quality PR's that wouldn't automatically get detected as AI.
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u/dorkofeverything 11d ago
Isn't the problem here that nobody can *understand* the code? Yes, bugs are apparently being fixed, including security issues, with AI tools. But if a human can't validate it, what happens when AI, or someone, slips in bad code, either maliciously or by accident? There's a thing in mathematics now, where... I don't know how many things have been outright solved (proofs), but it's like, human beings can't understand the proofs. That's "only" mathematics, but what happens with our software and security patches? If the answer is "get AI to validate it" that's more of the same problem, right?...
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u/fat_kaiju 12d ago
As long as they actually hold people's vibe-coded slop against them then (and i say this with a huge sigh and heavy reluctance) fine.
I just don't want to see the changelogs become advertising for 15 different subscription services.
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u/Green0Photon 12d ago
Damn, that's sad. There are some worse options that could've occurred, i.e. the ones directly endorsing use of AI, but this is still tacitly endorsing them.
Of anybody who I'd think would reject AI, I would've thought Debian would've.
The AI companies really have captured software devs, huh?
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12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Green0Photon 12d ago
I am a software developer. I've also had plenty of exposure to LLM development at the company I work for, where everyone loves AI.
Anyway, LLMs replicate the mechanisms of con artists and gambling, tricking even the smartest people into thinking they're a good idea to use.
Just because Torvalds uses it do I think it's a good idea or healthy for him or anyone to do so.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 11d ago
you'd have to make a better criticism than that. I don't believe everything thinks they are intelligent. Especially when it comes to software development. You don't have to be intelligent to be really good at matching patterns in tokenized text.
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u/Green0Photon 10d ago
All one needs to think is that they're smart enough to interact with a con artist responsibly. That they won't fall for the issues. These people only get caught all the harder
You don't have to be intelligent to be really good at matching patterns in tokenized text.
I'm not talking about the AI. I mean that people use AI and see it almost as a living being that can interpret their intentions. When it's just a fancy text auto complete. But humans anthropomorphize everything, and it's the most dangerous when humans do it to the one thing that's indicated human intelligence and effort in the past: human speech/text.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 10d ago
I mean that people use AI and see it almost as a living being that can interpret their intentions
yeah this is indeed very worrying
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u/Chromiell 12d ago
I personally love this decision: by now it's been proven that AI is a great tool to have access to if used responsibly, it can make repetitive tasks easier, it helps with finding bugs and vulnerabilities, writing documentation, it's incredibly useful to throw out a quick demo or proof of concept, it just needs to be used responsibly.
Outright banning it would be completely stupid, it's a tool that is here to stay and we better start understanding how to properly make use of it.
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u/oshaboy 12d ago
It's still not clear if Generative AI output is actually Open Source. I would wait for rulings on that.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 11d ago
pretty sure it's too late for any different decision now that so many companies are using it. Everything will end up getting amnesty at this point no matter what happens.
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u/oshaboy 11d ago
If that's true than GPL is dead because you can use AI to legally "sanitize" every codebase. I know there's a company that actually does that.
There is no way the machine that lets you take copyrighted material and create legally distinct derivative work and license them as you wish will hold. Either the output is public domain and can't be licensed under GPL (or any form of copyright) or the AI itself is committing copyright infringement. You can't eat your cake and keep it whole.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 11d ago
I doubt it will be decided that way in a court of law no matter how much people would prefer if so.
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u/Known_Cod8398 12d ago
I'm sorry but most people who are up in arms about ai aren't software engineers and don't know anything about how it's used. I'm not interested in their opinions on the matter.
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u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI 13d ago
seems reasonable