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KDE and AI, and you, and me (pointieststick.com)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as 'brigading' is... Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.

EDIT 2: Nate has since closed the comments on his blog, and the one discussion thread on KDE Discuss about the AI Policy was closed suddenly without explanation after a KDE developer began to discuss the ethics of AI use. Nate then responded after the thread was closed with this:

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[–] [S] 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Xfce and Debian have long track records as well, yet both have adopted permissive AI policies.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    And has the quality dropped? I agree that this increases the likelihood of bad code/docs etc. and that developers will need greater self-control. But I think the conversation should try to frame the question similarly as C memory safety. Yes its dangerous but despite the possibility of bugs we have lots of good software written in it.

    Of course one can object on more fundamental grounds...there then can be little conversations, instead we have persuasion.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 5 days ago*

    There are serious concerns beyond pure code quality.

    ::: spoiler The concerns

    1. Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

    2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

    3. All currently existing LLMs are unethically trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLMs have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

    4. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

    5. It is not clear if LLMs can be "just a tool".

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