Gentoo AI Policy

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is:

  Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at 
  generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They 
  are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful 
  enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, 
  they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo 
  projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from 
  developers and users to review contributions and detect the 
  mistakes resulting from the use of AI.

This is on-brand.

There was a time that I used Gentoo, and may again one day, but for the past N years, I’ve not had time to compile everything from source, and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code.

It can be a waste of energy and time to compile everything from source for standard hardware.

But, when I’m retired, maybe I’ll use it again just for the heck of it. And I’m glad that Gentoo exists.

> Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them: Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality. LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

Highly disingenuous. First, AI being trained on copyrighted data is considered fair use because it transforms the underlying data rather than distribute it as is. Though I have to agree that this is the relatively strongest ethical claim to stop using AI but stands weak if looked at on the whole.

The fact that they mentioned "energy and water use" should tell you that they are really looking for reasons to disparage AI. AI doesn't use any more water or energy than any other tool. An hour of Netflix uses same energy as more than 100 GPT questions. A single 10 hour flight (per person*) emits as much as around 100k GPT prompts. It is strange that one would repeat the same nonsense about AI without primary motive being ideological.

"The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality." this is just a shoddy opinion at this point.

To be clear - I understand why they might ban AI for code submissions. It reduces the barrier significantly and increases the noise. But the reasoning is motivated from a wrong place.

Maybe we’ll see a (new) distro with AI assisted maintainers. That would be an interesting experiment.

Unfortunately one caveat would be it will be difficult to separate the maintainers from the financial incentives, so it won’t be a fair comparison. (e.g. the labs funding full time maintainers with salaries and donations that other distros can only dream of)

> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

I’d be curious how much energy gentoo consumes versus a binary distro.

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't:

> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models.

I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?

> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

This is massively overblown. If they'd specifically said that their concerns were around the concentrated impact of energy and water usage on specific communities, fine, but then you'd have to have ethical concerns about a lot of other tech including video streaming; but the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products.

> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality.

Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software.

> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

So did email.

Dated 2024-04-14 and features nothing special.

Posted April 2024. I wonder how they feel about this now. Or will next year. Claude Code wouldn’t exist for another year when this was posted. Nevermind Codex. It’s already awkward. Within 12 months it will be cringeworthy.

This is a prime example of poor AI policy. It doesn't define what AI is – is using Google translate in order to engage on their mailing lists allowed? Is using Intellisense-like tools that we've had for decades allowed? The rationale is also poor, citing concerns that can be applied far more widely than just LLMs. The ethical concerns are pretty hand-wavy, I'm pretty sure email is used to empower spam and yet I suspect Gentoo have no problem using email.

The end result is not necessarily a bad one, and I think reasonable for a project like Gentoo to go for, but the policy could be stated in a much better way.

For example: thou shalt only contribute code that is unencumbered by copyright issues, contributions must be of a high quality and repeated attempts to submit poor quality contributions may result in new contributions not being reviewed/accepted. As for the ethical concerns, they could just take a position by buying infrastructure from companies that align with their ethics, or not accepting corporate donations (time or money) from companies that they disagree with.