Re: Draft permissive ballot option (was: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian)

Steve McIntyre <[email protected]> Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:15:57 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 09:39:57PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 08:14:53AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>> 1/ I believe that it's important for Debian to state that
>> LLMs raise many concerns (and not just related to copyright). That's
>> what this paragraph is trying to achieve (and I would welcome
>> suggestions to extend it from people against LLMs):
>> 
>> > The Debian project recognizes that AI-assisted contributions raise
>> > many concerns, e.g. about the technical quality and maintainability of
>> > such contributions, and their legal status. AI itself also raises
>> > additional concerns, about its impact on society at large, on the IT
>> > industry and on Free Software; about its environmental impact; and the
>> > aggressive or non-compliant practices of AI scrapers.
>> 
>> 2/ I believe that a clear set of safeguards is useful to make LLM usage
>> by others less inacceptable for contributors who would prefer to reject
>> LLMs. Specifically, I think that disclosure is important because some
>> contributors might choose to apply different standards to AI-assisted
>> contributions (and that's fine).
>
>I do not think that is fine, though. Why would I put a sound suggestion on
>the bottom of the pile or bin it just because it was written with the wrong
>editor or using a mail service I don't like?

This is a false equivalence, again.

Sending mail via gmail or using vim to write your code don't
materially affect the quality of that code. Neither are likely to
cause hallucinations in the code, or to use vast amounts of resources
in its production. (etc.)

There is a substantial difference here, and that's why people care
about this so much.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                [email protected]
"I used to be the first kid on the block wanting a cranial implant,
 now I want to be the first with a cranial firewall. " -- Charlie Stross

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