As a Debian developer, I have had to cast a vote for the General Resolution named LLM usage in Debian (progress report here). This was not an easy task for me…
It’s a good thing that the vote is secret so that people are not scared of voting according to their own beliefs. I have Debian friends on the whole spectrum of opinions that are represented here, and I hesitated twice on sharing my own thoughts for fear of alienating my relationship with them. But in the end, we all make efforts to respect the opinions of those who are not thinking like us, and it’s precisely that willingness to work together towards a solution that is acceptable by the majority that makes Debian so strong. So here’s the train of thoughts that I followed to cast my vote.
The difficulty for me was to reconcile the political statement that I want to make and my desire for this vote to not be (too) divisive for the Debian community, and to make sure we are not putting off newcomers with choices that might be hard to stand by in the long term.
So let’s be clear : if I had a magical wand to make AI and LLM disappear, I would use it for that purpose, since at this point in time I don’t believe that the benefits outweigh the costs that the AI race is inflicting on us. If I were a political decision-maker, I would forbid the construction of new data centers unless they also build renewable energy infrastructure to cover for their additional energy consumption. I would also legislate so that AI companies have to document what material they used to train their models, and I would forbid scraping for that purpose, and build ways for those companies to buy copies of properly-sourced training data. That is to say, I don’t like the way LLM are built by the players in that market, I’m pretty scared of the ecological impact of what those players are doing, and I’m certainly worried about the long term effect that LLM will have on society as a whole.
Nevertheless what brought me to Debian is the ability to experiment and contribute to something useful with cool technologies, and as a computer scientist, the potential of LLM done right is hard to ignore. Given what we have seen already, I expect that LLM will empower (a part of) the next generation to learn IT, computing and even Debian packaging. Completely refusing the use of LLM is likely to make it harder for us to attract new contributors. In fact, we have already seen people inside Debian that would likely stop contributing if they are now forbidden to use LLM. I know there are likely others that will quit Debian if we accept it too, but I hope we can find a middle-ground where such persons can decide that LLM are not welcome in the small corner of Debian that they are in charge of…
In the end, I decided that answering clearly the question “Shall we accept LLM contributions ?” was more important than making the political statement about the current state of affairs in the AI landscape, both because I believe that Debian statements have a negligible impact on policy-makers, and because historically Debian has grown by staying close to technical excellence and relatively far from politics, except when it comes to the way we handle people. And as much as I care about climate change, I don’t see how bringing this up in the context of a Debian statement is helping its cause.
More concretely, it gives the following ranking (in decreasing order of importance):
- B, D: those two choices are the clearest to express “Yes we should accept LLM contributions” and still acknowledge concerns about the way AI is built today
- F, H: those two choices do not forbid LLM usage but discourage their use and clearly voice the concerns
- E: this choice is basically the statu-quo and fails to acknowledge the concerns, but it does not forbid LLM usage
- None of the above
- G, A, C: those choices forbid LLM usage in various ways
I don’t know what option will win, but assuming that LLM-assisted contributions are allowed, I believe that it would be helpful to have further statements to clarify a few things:
- Even if Debian as a whole doesn’t want to ban LLM-assisted contributions, each maintainer or each team shall be free to forbid LLM assisted contributions in the parts of Debian that they are maintaining
- We should discourage usage of LLM provided by players with unethical behaviors (not sure if there are good players but well…)
