Comment by JuettnerDistrib
2 days ago
I find it ironic that so many OSS projects are or are considering banning LLM usage. After all, without OSS, LLMs would never have been this good at coding.
Shouldn't OSS be the first to benefit? Or should OSS be a bedrock of carefully curated code untouched by AI slop?
> Shouldn't OSS be the first to benefit?
OSS projects have in many cases been the first to be hurt by LLMs.
As you note, LLMs are heavily trained on OSS code. This makes them very good at "license-washing" copyleft code in to a decidedly-not-cleanroom reimplementation which is different enough at first glance that it would be hard to stop without a legal battle most OSS projects could not even dream of.
Plenty of ink has also been spilled on how LLMs have led to a significant increase in administrative workload for OSS maintainers by allowing users to produce a high volume of both bug reports and pull requests that are likely to be of varying quality or adherence to project standards but unlike a new human contributor will never develop in to a better community member. It's infinite newbies forever, a computer-generated Eternal September.
On top of all that, as noted in the Debian proposal the companies training these LLMs have proven themselves to have no shame or concern for the resources of others in the process of gathering data, inefficiently crawling every single URL they can find and nowadays even using their own models to generate new potential URLs that have never existed, in ways specifically designed to make filtering, rate limiting, or blocking the traffic altogether as hard as possible while performing what are often some of the most resource-expensive requests. These tactics have imposed substantial real costs on basically everyone who hosts their own infrastructure as well as community hosting projects, without even getting in to the hardware-related cost increases every single one of us have experienced.
LLMs have gone to a lot of OSS projects, stolen their code, beat up their maintainers, and emptied their wallets. Now the LLM people are coming by wanting big projects to work with them, "for their security" like a protection racket.
> Shouldn't OSS be the first to benefit?
Yes, it should. And not just for code. Think better, more accurate documentation, quick start guides for both developers and users, reduce yak shaving effort, etc.
> should OSS be a bedrock of carefully curated code untouched by AI slop?
Slop is slop. There's plenty of human slop in OSS.