The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it's such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn't everything like that be known?
Linux
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
I wonder what's the reason to make it optional? I think I've seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn't transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can't even tell?! So why? What's the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?
I think it's just the simple fact that there's no way to enforce it
so the solution then is to just give up??
sorry but that's obviously nonsense, you can have unenforceable rules, god isn't going to smite you for doing so.
There are ways to enforce it. Yeah, you won't be able to make everyone follow the rule, but it's the same with any law and any public policy and they're still valuable. You don't make campaigns against DUI because you expect everyone to stop doing it, as that's a nirvana fallacy, you make them because you expect them to reduce DUI.
There are so many levels of LLM involvement and once you make this distinction you actually have to devote some of your limited resources to define and enforce it. So I think it might not be strictly beneficial, but possibly also have downsides.
Where would you draw the line at which point it counts as LLM involvement? Having one run as some sort of spell/syntax checker? Doing some research (and being influenced by it) before hand coding something? Having it create a working prototype and then reimplementing it by hand? If you use code from somewhere else to solve a problem and ai use has not been disclosed for this code, do you automatically have to assume LLM usage was involved or is there plausible deniability?
I think in the end you'd have to use too many resources check it and debate where the line is drawn, when the real question is how you retain human knowledge and engagement within your community.
Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.
The world needs more people that act on principles and take a stance.
"AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you'll need JavaScript enabled."
The ironic...

@ProdigalFrog
> "Pretending to have a "neutral stance" when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration."
Bars. I'm sure it wasn't an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.
The point isn't so much the quality of the code itself.
The point is that AI is an inefficient power-wasting piece of trash, and the data centres that power it have significant negative impacts on people and the environment, all for the sake of devs being lazy idiots. And you'd have to be an idiot to let AI take away your skills.
The point is also that this is the pre-enshittification version of AI, and any person or system foolish enough to become dependent on it will get exploited to the best of AI companies' abilities.
If only there were some community of people who valued using free and open source software so we had options that were not dependent on the whims of companies. Then we could have software that we could depend on that isn't dependent on the whims of corporations.
Throwing out AI because there are AI companies who causing harm is like giving up on Operating Systems because of the plethora of bad acts made by Microsoft.
I agree that everyone should using OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other companies which were created to spend trillions of dollars buying up all computer hardware on the planet while building fossil fueled datacenters.
That isn't the same as thinking that the actual machine learning technology itself is somehow inherently bad. There are many open weight models and FOSS projects that lets people use AI without contributing to the capitalist orgy that's causing all of the secondary harms.
People conflating AI technology and AI companies are failing to diagnose the issue that we're facing.
So Open-Source and FOSS projects collectively decided that they want to jump on half-sunken ship in the middle of the ocean?
Amazing.
What's Devuan's position on this? They already forked after the SystemD switch. Here's to hoping they also flip the bird to AI.
And here I was suspecting myself of looking for elitism for my thoughts of switching to some *BSD system
Well Debian has been a fun ride for the last 20 years or so... Wonder what's next...
Personally i find debian change of policies to include proprietary firmwares by default worst than this
Surprising that it was even an option.
There were 8 options and Debian has ranked choice voting. This was actually around the middle of the spectrum of options, so with half voting most to least restrictive and the other vice versa, the middle of the road choice won.
I'm not an AI evangelist but I am open-minded. I think Debian's decision is balanced, and more importantly realistic.
There's a difference between vibe coding and using AI to improve productivity. I'm a dev and pretty much everyone I know is using AI in some way. Yes they'll lose contributors initially but Debian would lose more in the long run if they'd outright banned it.
For all those who are saying 'AI supports fascists' - the most popular models right now are Chinese. Very oppressive and paranoid government but definitely not fascist.
For all those that say 'AI causes global warming' - you're correct, but unless you've got your own solar panels, so does your non-AI gaming rig. And your gas-driven car.
I disagree. You are an AI evangelist and quite closed-minded. Having a "balanced" approach, if there was one, would be to label any AI usage explicitly. If you're afraid to label your AI usage, you're a fucking coward.
But, damn, let's not blame the billion dollar data centers for global warming, guys! It's the individual decisions you make every day that kills the planet! If you believe this, the AI has fried your brain. It's not one authoritarian government, it's a different one! Actual paste-eating behavior. My work has improved with LLM usage! A common saying from people who were not good at their job, and are somehow now worse without them realizing it.
Any decent developer I have found has hated LLMs because they do not work anywhere near as well as people who are shit at things think they do. Personally, I don't really like smashing the Skinner Box button hoping the output works this time because I like programming, and having Claude rape my codebase seems like a bad idea to me if I ever want to go back in there. But, then again, I like knowing how my code works, so maybe I should just lobotomize myself and I'll understand why you like it so much.
Wow. You know, it is possible to have a discussion and even disagree with people without being a nasty peice of work?
For all those that say 'AI causes global warming' - you're correct, but unless you've got your own solar panels, so does your non-AI gaming rig. And your gas-driven car.
so fucking what? stop trying unless you're perfect? every bit helps! fuck you
and the death blow is when more like-minded developers do the same... there won't be enough left that would vote to change policy to try to lure some back.