NetBSD’s New Policy: No Place for AI-Created Code
Quoting: NetBSD's New Policy: No Place for AI-Created Code —
Last month, Gentoo officially opposed using AI-generated code in their distribution. Now, NetBSD, an OS part of the Unix-like BSD family, has announced a stringent policy regarding code generated by AI technologies, including large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot.
Update:
See also:
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NetBSD, [plagiarism]-generated code, spam, and truth
AI-generated code is going about as well as you’d expect. Fun!
We start with The Register:
Pulumi Hey Hi (AI) and its online archive of responses, Hey Hi (AI) Answers, is a case in point. Google’s search crawler indexes the output of Pulumi’s Hey Hi (AI) and presents it to search users alongside links to human-authored content. Software developers have found some of the resulting AI-authored documentation and code inaccurate or even non-functional.
Tom's Hardware:
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Linux distros ban 'tainted' AI-generated code — NetBSD and Gentoo lead the charge on forbidding AI-written code | Tom's Hardware
Two major Linux distributions ban the contribution of AI-generated code to their open-source projects.
The Register:
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Gentoo and NetBSD ban 'AI' code, but Debian doesn't – yet
The first FOSS OS project to ban code generated by LLM bots was Gentoo, which issued a council policy forbidding code generated with "AI" tools in mid-April. This week, the NetBSD project updated its commit guidelines with a similar edict.
Gentoo's policy identifies three points that prompted the decision: copyright, quality, and ethical concerns. Of the three, the middle one is the easiest to understand. Code quality is almost self-explanatory: these tools often produce extremely poor quality code. Firstly, no project wants to include bad code. Secondly, nobody really wants contributions from programmers who aren't able to identify poor-quality code, or who are unable to write better themselves – or at least to improve the bot's efforts. As such, this is the least important reason.
Debian's position:
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Debian dismisses AI-contributions policy
In April, the Gentoo Linux project banned the use of generative AI/ML tools due to copyright, ethical, and quality concerns. This means contributors cannot use tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to create content for the distribution such as code, documentation, bug reports, and forum posts. A proposal for Debian to adopt a similar policy revealed a distinct lack of love for those kinds of tools, though it would also seem few contributors support banning them outright.
Tiago Bortoletto Vaz started the discussion on the Debian project mailing list on May 2, with the suggestion that the project should consider adopting a policy on the use of AI/ML tools to generate content. Vaz said that he feared that Debian was ""already facing negative consequences in some areas"" as a result of this type of content, or it would be in a short time. He referenced the Gentoo AI policy, and Michał Górny's arguments against AI tools on copyright, quality, and ethical grounds. He said he was in agreement with Górny, but wanted to know how other Debian contributors felt.