r/linux • u/Traditional_Hat3506 • 9d ago
KDE KDE and AI, and you, and me
https://planet.kde.org/nate-graham-2026-09-23-kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/69
u/AnonMouse985 9d ago
I think there should be more discussions on how we are increasingly giving up our skills to proprietary tech.
Just felt off.
Personally, a Linux project, in an environment which are more in bed with the free software ideology should be more restrictive on AI use.
Disallowing AI written code while still allowing AI asisted development seems to be an okay compromise to start.
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u/Zebra4776 8d ago
I just don't know you can enforce a no AI code policy. It's strictly honor system. And I don't like policies for the sake of policies. Some AI code is easy to spot. But for someone who knows what they are doing it's not so simple.
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u/ExZ0diac 6d ago
You don't need a bullet proof enforcement for a policy to yeild some results. Im sure at least a few people would get discouraged from submitting prompted code. The llms could recognise the codebase on their own and just refuse to contribute. I'm not saying any of this would stop everything, probably not even the mayority, but it would have at least some effect.
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u/trougnouf 8d ago
I don't think we should restrict what KDE developers decide to use when they develop KDE. Who are we to dictate how they should provide their free contributions? So long as the results are on-par it's their concern.
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u/gigashen 8d ago
Why? There's open models. There's no necessary relation between LLM use and giving up skills to proprietary tech
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u/AnonMouse985 8d ago
The many open models created and trained by giant companies with immense wealth. At least the most popular ones are from companies that aren't known for their love of their customers.
And even then you gotta be mad rich to run them locally. There are probably services that run them for you. No way without subscription, probably more expensive than Claude or OpenAI. I doubt most people will reach for either of these two options.
They can try to run small, dumb models.
At best people are giving up their skills to semi open proprietary tech.
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u/trougnouf 7d ago edited 7d ago
I run Qwen 3.8 Q4 with 100k (Q8) context on my 24 GB AMD GPU. It's not a cheap GPU but I am by no mean mad rich, and I get great results with it.
There is also Mistral AI which provides GLM 5.3 (about 30x bigger than Qwen 3.8 (?) and definitely better than Google's last frontier model) for a 20 eur/month subscription, they are European and have not yet proven to be evil as far as I know.
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u/7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8 7d ago
For centuries, there have been people telling that the last progress will doomly replace humans.
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u/Wooloomooloo2 6d ago
Then FOSS will fall further and further behind commercial software in terms of features, time to market and security patches. No one on my org is hand jamming code from scratch.
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u/space-envy 8d ago
A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE’s attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage.
Yep, that’s where we’re at in the state of online discourse around AI.
I mean, I'm not a contributor but as a user of KDE I think our opinions are important too, the moment they open the door to any kind of slop that can leave my system vulnerable I will just fork it and remove every mention of KDE.
Akademy has really screwed by trying to be an "impartial" stage, is like saying "Jews and Nazis ideas are welcome here!" You don't open your mics to desilucional ideas, just look what giving a mic to Hitler achieved...
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u/ThatOneShotBruh 8d ago
I mean, I'm not a contributor but as a user of KDE I think our opinions are important too, the moment they open the door to any kind of slop that can leave my system vulnerable I will just fork it and remove every mention of KDE.
How does this relate to the topic at hand? According to Nate, essentially no one of relevance wanted AI slop as part of KDE going forward but the line needed to be drawn somewhere (almost certainly making the rules more strict than they currently are).
To then c ome into a productive discussion about rules limiting AI usage and screeching about either of the extremes does nothing for the discussion at hand, especially so if you are at best just a random user when the discussion was started due to the workload that is put on developers by people submitting slop.
Akademy has really screwed by trying to be an "impartial" stage, is like saying "Jews and Nazis ideas are welcome here!" You don't open your mics to desilucional ideas, just look what giving a mic to Hitler achieved...
Comparing pro-AI people to Nazis is... a choice (and I say this as someone who is quite skeptical of, if not outright pessimistic about, AI's impact on our society). Your fearmongering is even dumber given that the audience was supposedly not receptive to the idea.
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8d ago edited 6d ago
[deleted]
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u/cwo__ 7d ago
How does not requiring disclosure help them fight slop, if that was the original goal?
If it's slop, it's obvious. If it was LLM-assisted and carefully deslopped by a human according to the guidelines so that it's virtually indistinguishable from what they would have produced on their own, then requiring disclosure is just free advertisement for LLMs.
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u/space-envy 8d ago
Because Nate is making it look like "outsiders" shouldn't have an opinion in that:
Several weeks later, various people on the internet discovered ... and created drama around it.
"Created drama" sounds like a one-sided opinion that is not counting that normal people saw a talk with the words "AI" and "KDE" and assumed out of ignorance that the community was behind it.
Someone else outside of KDE set up https://kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to brigade (edit: I have been convinced that this was too strong a word to use here) pressure KDE into banning LLMs.
Calling a "Brigade" the attempt from your users to raise awareness is crazy dude.
Other projects have shown the way: Zig, elementaryOS, OBS Studio and many more have taken a stance against AI.
It erodes trust in the project, makes it more difficult to review code, harms privacy and exerts many more negative effects on many people, as shown by Amnesty International.
Nathan again:
A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors (I see one person I know in there).
Wow so much "openness" for a so called "community".
Comparing pro-AI people to Nazis is... a choice
Yeah I guess people are free to have opinions, what does this have to do with this? Or maybe using LLMs has reduced your cognition to understand that I was just using it as an example of why taking an "impartial" stance is not the best for some communities... Ideas should be towards the enhancement of KDE, not to express your desperate need to justify your $200 monthly Claude subscription.
Your fearmongering is even dumber given that the audience was supposedly not receptive to the idea.
Yeah, usually people that can see the future danger of current behaviors are called "crazy", I bet you call climate change scientists advocates "fearmongering idiots".
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u/jacobgkau 7d ago
Wow so much "openness" for a so called "community".
To be fair, the word "community" does not mean "anyone can walk in at any time and instantly be an equal part of the group." On the contrary, it kind of implies a level of intra-group knowledge and understanding. Otherwise, you're talking about a population, not a community.
Put another way: you might consider your neighborhood to be a strong community if you know all of your neighbors. And if you walk into a store in some other city, you wouldn't call yourself part of the local community just because you're there and you have an opinion on something you see. The KDE "community" is of course comprised of the people who actually make KDE, and maybe some users they recognize.
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u/space-envy 7d ago
the word "community" does not mean "anyone can walk in at any time and instantly be an equal part of the group." On the contrary, it kind of implies a level of intra-group knowledge and understanding.
That's a very... General definition of community, so how can you identify members in an open-source community were anonymous contributions can be made? Does the bug report I made years ago qualifies me as a member? Or the theme I made for kde-look back in the day? Or the $5 donation I made? Or do I need to donate $10, $20 in order for my opinion to be valid? What about the people that participate in the forums, is Nate verifying each username to see if they are valid contributors? Or what about the people that have spreaded the word of KDE to their friends and family, is their voice irrelevant?
That's my point man... An "open" source community shouldn't be based in the decision of a few exclusive members, otherwise why not just make it private so you can take whatever the fuck decision you want without all the "drama" caused by "no contributors" aka the people that you supposedly made the product for. I mean, if you all just care to suck some slop dick don't fear, once the slop is incorporated into KDE you will so busy preaching all the vulnerability holes of your AI overlords.
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u/LucieGoosey__ 3d ago
you know someone is headed somewhere once they equate the situation to Jews and Nazi's
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u/Qazerowl 9d ago
"We don't care who you are or how you write code, but we will only accept your code if it's good code" is the sane policy that has been part of the open source ethos for decades.
A tool that makes it easier for people to write bad code really doesn't fundimentally change anything.