Gentoo bans AI-created contributions

Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to Linux@lemmy.ml – 286 points –
lwn.net
63

Górny took issue with everything from the energy consumption driven by AI

This has to be a joke. The team behind a distro that compiles everything from scratch all the time is concerned about wasting power now? The only distro for which I ever setup a compile cluster?

Give me a break. This is the new luddite movement.

Gotta say your comment makes an insightful impression, however Gentoo compilations are peanuts compared to the massive energy sucking hype that A.I. is. I am glad that people speak out publicly against this insane madness. A.I. hyping during climate crisis ? Overwhelming sales of SUVs Plans to move to planet Mars Who would have guessed that years ago ?

Well it's the training of LLMs that consumes so much energy, simply using them (for say software development purposes) (inference) probably takes less power than recompiling your Gentoo.

Nobody can argue that ChromeOS (gentoo) Is the fastest and lightest and more polished distro available, though

Gentoo compilations are peanuts compared to the massive energy sucking hype that A.I. is.

Their overall impact is low because they're niche. It wouldn't be if Gentoo were more popular. Imagine all of the AWS EC2 instances running Gentoo. And all of the Docker container builds still compiling glibc over and over.

Fact is they still built a horrifically inefficient system for deploying software. It's a crazy hypocritical stance to take. AI at least provides benefit - something that can't be said of Gentoo's waste.

When you have multiple Gentoo machines, you compile soft once and distribute it. You would be mad to compile everything every time.

You really went looking for something to hate on there didn't you. That is the only sentence in the whole article that even mentions power consumption, all the other arguments both fit and against are for a variety of other topics.

It seems to be that you are more likely caught up in some kind of movement if one argument from one person is enough for you to label everyone there luddites

You really went looking for something to hate on there didn’t you. That is the only sentence in the whole article that even mentions power consumption, all the other arguments both fit and against are for a variety of other topics.

The rest of the ridiculous moralizing was pretty bad as well. This was just the most egregiously stupid thing listed in the article.

I thought your comment was more ridiculous

1 person making a query has thousands of hours of computing behind it

1 person compiling software themselves does not

I'm not saying AI is not energy intensive. I'm saying the team who developed the least efficient Linux distribution throwing shade about AI being "energy inefficient" are hypocrites.

But again it wasn't the team, and it wasn't " throwing shade" it was one guy, who listed it as one reason against AI. Power consumption is also a valid reason against using gentoo. People are able, and indeed should be aware of potential problems and downside of things, even if they are involved in other things which also has those issues. I am sure most of the gentoo team would readily acknowledge that energy consumption is a downside of gentoo compared to other distros.

If being a luddite means keeping man in the loop so be it.

The original Luddite movement was literally a worker's rights movement, and the "irrationally afraid of technology" characterization was manufactured by the ruling class, so yes. The Luddites were right then and they're right now too.

The only problem the Luddites had is they went and busted the machines instead of the rich owners' kneecaps.

If you say, "they did that too!" Well, NOT ENOUGH!!

There was an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that covered the luddites, I had no idea beforehand what they actually stood for, fascinating stuff

As someone who regularly saves time by automating, I can’t get on board for a movement which directly opposes process improvement by improving efficiency.

They're not, they're opposing a process that leads to garbage output and horrible systemic efficiency.

Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I’ve also read a book on the subject of Luddites and it was clear to me that it was a response to higher efficiency machinery replacing the need for a good portion of their jobs.

This led to mass starvation as the workers no longer could feed themselves and no industry replaced the lost work. The textiles produced were of lower quality too, and sold for less which harmed the local economy leading to a rise in food prices along with the lower wages. Since the vast majority of arable land was used for cotton too no local food could lower the prices. Many people died as the luddites predicted.

There was mass starvation

They were right. This is not "anti-automation" this is against lower wages, mass unemployment, and an economic decrease. The automation was the cause of this, yes, but the concept of automation was not the issue. The issue was it's use here.

If the workers were provided an alternative job, if there was some plan to avoid starvation, and if the textiles were of a reasonable quality then there would be no issue.

History proved the luddites correct

The Luddites lost, but you should read the rest of this wiki article to learn how that happened, and consider again which side you're on.

But the lump of labour fallacy is wrong - in the end automation makes us all wealthier as goods become cheaper, and people can do more productive work (and be better educated for it too).

This is how it should be, but it isn't the present day reality. Productivity goes up, wages go down, and the rich get richer. We're headed straight for technofeudalism buddy...

To a certain extent other distros rely on more obscure distros like gentoo which uses package compilation as the default. If upstream are not publishing code which can be reproducibly built then the gentoo maintainers are the first to know and can raise an issue.

Cool story.

Tell me you don't know how FOSS works without telling me you don't know how FOSS works...

wut? Your reply had absolutely nothing to do with any point or argument I was making. Near as I can tell you think I'm assaulting Gentoo or something? Missed my point by a wide margin though.

Also I think nobody so far weighed the energy consumption of e.g. using copilot against the environmental footprint of a human doing the legwork manually

This is the new luddite movement.

It really is. Degrowth is destitution and death - just look at Germany.

We need to decouple electricity production from environmental damage - build renewable power and nuclear power station en masse and invest heavily in nuclear fusion.

Degrowth is a hilarious word to use here because degrowth is literally necessary for us to not run the natural resources of our planet dry. Infinite growth in a finite planet is just logically impossible.

The first part is at best controversial. The middle part is actually reasonable. And the last part is just ridiculously random and out-of-touch.

Even with infinite free electricity, it still takes tons of water to cool all the gpus

How would they determine what is AI generated and what is not?

Every tenth line of code needs a comment break for a detailed ascii “drawing” of human hands

This is just a normal fist! I don't see anything wrong with it!

    _______
---'   ____)____
          ______)
          ______)
          _______)
         _______)
         _______)
---.__________)

I don't think that this is a hard rule. They probably look for the same signs that we do - plausible sounding utter gibberish. They just don't want the drop in quality due to that. If an author creates content with AI, but takes their time to edit and improve it, I think that the Gentoo team may give it a pass.

When you write a copyright notice you aught to specify which code is actually copyrighted and which is AI written? Guess you can just include the code and pretend you wrote it, or just omit which part is actually the non-copyrighted AI code.

Chat-GPT seems to have some issues with excessive amount of code

If you can tell the contribution is ai generated, it's not good enough

Might as well ban stack overflow based contributions as well.

AI is a great tool for coding. As long as it's used responsibly. Like any other tool, really.

External LLMs are great for getting ideas and a quick overview of something, and helpers integrated into IDEs are useful to autocomplete longer lines of code or repetitive things.

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Lol Lemmy socialists are so butthurt. Your statement is literally most reasonable and sane/rational, but lemmy.ml only knows cringey extremism.

What the heck are you on about???? There are no comments on this thread that sounds "butthurt". And I don't especially like your generalisation of Lemmy users. You sound like a troll.

Socialism is when people use tools to help complete a task?

For fuck sake you may as well come out as a pedophile if you're going to be posting shit like this.

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But how would they know? It's like Blade Runner.

Lots of companies will do this, eventually advertising the purity and the size of their human created training data.

These will be the companies selling their content to AI companies, although some will probably just be scanned in illegally. Perhaps a new type of copy write lawsuit will have to be invented.

Most people will continue to use these sites, aware their data is being used like this.