Some Linux Distributions Are Already BANNING AI Code!
Gentoo Linux and NetBSD are now rejecting program code generated with the assistance of LLM tools, such as Github's Copilot.
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.
The other two are trickier, but underlying them is the basis for the NetBSD project's decision. To understand the significance of these criteria, it's necessary to understand what these so-called "AI assistants" are and how they work – which is also the reason that the Reg FOSS desk puts "AI" in quotation marks. "AI assistants", and "generative AI" in general, are not intelligent.
Note: This article includes an excellent (clear and simple) explanation o:
- how Large Language Models are created
- what type of output they generate.
Not only are LLM bots not intelligent, they aren't artificial, either. The word "artificial" means made by humans to resemble existing examples in nature; it's from the same route as "art", "artful", "artifice" and "artificer." In the case of LLMs, the models are built by transformer algorithms, not built by humans. The artifice was constructing the algorithm, not the gigabytes of statistics it created
As a comparison, even if you learn how 3D printers work, design one, buy all the components and build it yourself, the plastic shapes it outputs are not hand-made. Very artful, skilled people write transformer algorithms, which extract patterns from huge amounts of human-written source material and then imitate it. That imitation is not artifice: the art was in writing the tool that can learn to imitate its input data.
"Not intelligent" + "not artificial" = not artificial intelligence. QED.
This is why LLM bots are starting to get some splendid nicknames. We especially like "stochastic parrots" – in other words, they parrot their input data, but re-arranged randomly. As an acronym, we also like "Plagiarized Information Synthesis System." (We feel that "synthetic information" is a particularly interesting term: it looks like information, but it's not, really.)
Extrapolating text, or images, modelled upon human-created input is how LLMs work. All of their output is hallucinated. Since no humans designed the models or can inspect the models, it is not possible to adjust them so that they don't emit text that is not factual. The only LLM bots that create interesting, useful output are the really big ones: small ones can only find and copy simple patterns, so they can't produce interesting output.
LLM bots are a wholly remarkable new type of tool, and absolutely not useless toys – although in the tradition of recent developments in IT, they are enormously wasteful and consume vast amounts of computing power, electricity, and cooling. :{Like all blockchain efforts before them, they are environmentally catastrophi:(style="background-color:#ffff00ff"):}:c. That's not going away, and anyone who tries to tell you that it is – for instance, by driving the development of more efficient technology – is trying to sell you something. LLMs are already driving the development of new processors with circuitry devoted to running LLM models, which renders older processors obsolete and thus consigns them to landfill, :{creating a different kind of ecological disaster.}: