Comment by prologic
3 days ago
This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.
Linus Torvalds said last week that LLMs were just a tool. Lorenzo Stoakes had the impeccable rebuttal that "it's a tool in the same way a nuclear bomb is just a tool" - of course it's useful but there is clearly more to it than that.
I'm happy for Debian to at least consider the other aspects of social impact, ethics, copyright, and maintainability.
An LLM is a tool.
A nuclear bomb is a tool.
And programmers are the biggest tools of them all.
/ba dum tis
You wouldn't program a computer with a nuclear bomb!!!
It's more like: food processing tool A is known to be defective. We ask employees of this restaurant and supply chains to avoid food processing tool A. This seems eminently reasonable. The question is whether the tool is in fact defective.
That's just it though. The tool(s) aren't necessarily defective. Just because you can chop off your own hand with an chainsaw or do a botch job of sawing a plank of wood because you weren't watching what you were doing with the electric saw, does not by itself make the tools (Chainsaw, Electric Saw) defective.
Or does it?
https://youtu.be/gOReKxH5NlA?t=154
I agree "not by itself" was said, mostly your comment just made me think of this newer tech for table saws. And, made me think "when is a design inadequacy a defect"?
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The tool makes the food taste bad in ... say ... 20% of the cases, and in 5% of the cases it contaminates the food with salmonella.
Yes you can have the chefs taste the food before serving, and test it for salmonella. But it would be completely reasonable for a regulator to ban such a tool, and even more reasonable for restaurants to have a strict policy against using this tool.
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Why don't you come back to talking about software rather than using terrible analogies.
LLMs write bad code / so do people, a lot of really bad code.
LLMs write security bugs / so do people, so many god damned security bugs.
Yes, people make mistakes. But they make far fewer than LLMs.
Sure, kind of, if the supposed defect is only one of the reasons, and if ‘food processing tool A’ was a hot-button topic that many people have deeply philosophical and ideological opinions about. Oh, and for good measure, if the proposed ban is for ‘food processors’ in general, and a material amount of pushback is coming from a bunch of greybeard industrial cooks that used one particular food processor a couple of years ago, weren’t all that impressed, and have been railing against food processors ever since.
Ironically, any SoTA LLM would be able to make a better analogy than you. Sometimes the average human is the slop generator
Yes, they are. But that’s exactly what Proposal B (the only one without moral panic) says: allow its use, but place the responsibility on whoever uploads it. If you upload broken or unlicensed code, that’s on you. Proposal B is the most pragmatic and realistic option.
Yes. this I agree with. It's teh same thing many corporations like the one I work for are doing as well. Expecting and mandating that even if you use these so-called "AI" tools. that you are a) responsible and b) accountable for the "work".
> This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand.
Stupid? Since when has there been a lack of clarity in copyright status with electric vs. hand saws?
This has nothing to do with copyright status or copyrighted works. If it did, Debian wouldn't even be a thing. You can't be a puritan about this; How much of Debian can one say, hand on heart, is truly not inspired, or influenced by other people's work, copyrighted or not.
> This has nothing to do with copyright status or copyrighted works.
It's literally the first rationale of choice 1 of proposal A. How does this have "nothing to do" with it?
Probably since we all started getting our legal advice from you and every other “I think that it’s illegal so it’s illegal” developer-turned-fake-lawyer on the Internet. Oh, wait, that never happened.
Yeah, I agree, it's really stupid. It's like discussing whether contributors are allowed to use google search, stackoverflow, an encyclopedia, etc.