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The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want
Quoting: The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want – Rust in Peace —
KDE is on the news because of a controversial proposal to define an official “AI” (LLM) policy (archived link). Other projects have tried their hand at similar policies and stances but, in my opinion, they miss the mark about the goal of such initiatives. I think that the point of these statements is shaping social norms and not micro-managing developer workflows. They should be about signalling what kind of behavior we want, and what kind we reject.
This proposal does not go into detail about the many problems that LLM have caused to society, workers, the environment. It goes without saying that all these ills are fundamentally opposed to the humanist spirit of GNOME.
With all that in mind, here is what I personally think a GNOME LLM policy could be: [...]
More discussion:
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Diego Escalante Urrelo: LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs
GNOME and KDE have started to consider LLM policies, and we should talk about what this is really about.
KDE caught everyone's attention first by igniting a flame war with an LLM-friendly draft that ended up being deleted, causing a few bans, and having a bunch of people go full "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make". GNOME has not proposed anything official, but some teams (gnome-calendar, loupe, libadwaita, gnome-software, Circle, among others) already have strong policies in place, and there is now an informal draft to ban all LLM contributions to GNOME projects and infrastructure.
However I believe these discussions are not about nitpicking workflows but rather about the raison d'être, the reason to be, of FLOSS projects.
Late addition:
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Arun Raghavan: On LLMs and free software
Like many, I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of LLMs on the free software community. In the GNOME community, there have been a couple of posts on Planet GNOME and Discourse, and assorted heated discussions on Matrix and Mastodon. We are not unique in this — there are similar conversations in the KDE and Debian communities as well.
I think we should be actively working on figuring out how best we can adapt to the new world we find ourselves in, and use LLMs for the good of GNOME.
The argument being made
Some folks in the community would like to have the GNOME project refuse to accept LLM-generated content (be it code, bug reports, or other forms of contributions).