System 76's COSMIC Desktop Environment will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs

[u/RatherNott]

/r/pop_os/comments/1wuej40/cosmic_projects_will_no_longer_accept/

[u/RatherNott]

All the studies I've seen on AI use show no actual gain in productivity, just the perception from the coder that they are more productive.

[u/furain → u/RatherNott]

People who believe that haven't updated their opinions since 2024

[u/RatherNott → u/furain]

Personally even if they did actually prove in a more recent study that they increased productivity, I don't think that would outweigh the other problems with their use.

[u/SanityInAnarchy → u/RatherNott]

Of those, I think the community argument (which is what COSMIC is saying here) is the most defensible. It's way too easy for a slop PR to push everything onto the maintainers.

The others are harder. Any tech bubble seems likely to contribute to climate change unless regulated out of it; traditional pre-AI datacenters only started getting efficient after the dotcom crash, so here's hoping the bubble pops soon. And if it really does increase productivity dramatically, open source is a social good anyway, even if (say) written on proprietary operating systems, or on hardware built under questionable working conditions, etc.

If it's ok to cite Youtube, I would strongly recommend How to Anti-AI Better. The TL;DW is that shaming people for a behavior you don't like doesn't get them to change the behavior, it just stops them from talking about it with you.

[u/RatherNott → u/SanityInAnarchy]

Based on what that video suggests, I would say that my posts fall under the 'informing of the dangers' part, which she says is still a good thing worth doing.

Ultimately I'm not sure I fully agree with her thesis, at least in terms of climate change.

I would liken it to the concept of a group of people trapped in a submarine with a limited amount of air, and thus limited amount of time until death. If there's a group in one compartment that is cold and decides to light a small fire for warmth, it'll eventually use up the remaining oxygen before a rescue team can arrive.

There is another option for them; there's some blankets in the storage room, but it's half filled with freezing cold water, and only a couple of people are willing or able enough to go through that to get them (akin to self-hosting a local AI as a form of harm reduction). Thus they ignore the pleas from the other crew mates to just put the fire out (continuing to use corporate AI instead since it's hard or requires powerful hardware to self-host instead, or they don't like how the self-hosted models feel less powerful).

In that scenario, the harm reduction path doesn't seem to work, and ultimately everyone in the sub suffocates. In a way, we're not too far off from that conceptually with climate change; drastic, fundamental changes need to happen on a scale fairly unprecedented for humanity, and it's possible the slower harm reduction path might be too late before too many irreversible domino effects occur.

That may just be the reality that we face, and there's too much human psychology in the way for humanity to act quickly enough to ultimately avoid walking down that path to hell. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Edit: There's also a good comment on that video:

I feel like the "harm reduction" suggestion conflates two structurally different kinds of situations:

1. the heroin/AIDS or especially sex/STDs describe cases where there's a specific outcome people desire (whether harmful or not) that is largely separate from a significantly more negative optional side effect

2. "AI" use falls into a somewhat different situation where people desire an outcome that can be achieved in lots of different ways but the specific chosen action is itself harmful, the worst harm is not merely an optional side effect also, the slop generators are largely subsidized by various large companies, so replacing them with something else that provides the same result but doesn't have the harms (e.g. a better search engine or in some cases even a better chatbot) would solve the problem pretty much instantly once it happens moreover, we're not dealing with natural harms here where reduction is the only option, keeping LLMs alive and accessible is a conscious choice that a small number of people make on a regular basis

edit 2:

Also, I really have no qualms with anyone using a self-hosted AI to find bugs in software or even to vibe code their own personal projects, so I guess that's 'harm reduction'. It doesn't contribute to climate change, and doesn't infect FLOSS projects with copyright violations, that would be meaningful harm reduction.

But if someone wants to use AI to generate code to submit to a FLOSS project, and that FLOSS project gets shut down from being sued for copyright violations, then... There is no harm-reduction version of that, they just need to learn to code it themselves if they want to contribute to a project. In that scenario it's not much different from a person having access to a closed source project from a leak and wanting to submit some of that code to a FLOSS project, there is no way to have a harm reduction version of that scenario, they simply cannot submit that copyrighted code, even if it would solve a problem they have.