- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- techtakes@awful.systems
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- techtakes@awful.systems
Direct link to the LLM Policy Discussion: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/work_items/187
Example of a KDE dev not wanting environmental concerns to play any role, despite KDE having an environmental project:
Devs rejecting any notion of transparency by disclosing AI usage in code submissions (in direct opposition to advice from the FSFE):
And all of this is coming right after the debacle with an AI slop project being allowed to give a presentation at Akademy, and the person asking how this was allowed being blocked by KDE:
https://lemmy.nz/post/42029517
as well as the discussion thread bringing up legitimate concerns about AI usage being closed:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/sorry-to-bring-up-a-contentious-topic-kde-ai-llm-policy/46333/164
As someone who genuinely loves KDE, and has even donated to the project multiple times, I sadly have to accept that the majority of KDE have hopped onto the Pro-AI train, and they will not be dissuaded otherwise.
You must log in or register to comment.
I am locking the thread because I consider this cherry picking comments from KDE maintainers misinformation. Let’s wait and see where they go… The discussion as to include gen AI code, in which ways, how much, etc. is something that many projects (if not all) are undergoing. Let’s be respectful to their open decision processes! This respectfulness needs to be regardless of whether we agree or not with what they do. Once they make a decision, sure, go ahead with flaming commentaries and endorsing alternatives or forks (if they appeared)
Guess I’ll stay on xfce…
I switched to Niri a few months ago as an experiment but now I guess I will not go back to KDE anytime soon
It starts with “oh, just clean up any code generated” and “you must understand what your code does” and then in a decade that person won’t remember how to code at all because they self-lobotomized themselves for the convenience.
I don’t think becoming a worse coder is necessarily a big problem as long as code review really happens, as long as the human in the picture retains their algorithmic thinking there is no lobotomy. Of course we all know how human laziness works, so thinking that people would actually keep reviewing code after they find no major issues N times in a row is a pipe dream.
And I don’t know about you guys, but I for one dislike reading someone else’s code. LLM generated blocks can be especially bad for testing my sanity.
Yeah when I’m reading code and it becomes obvious there was zero thought behind a bit of logic, I lose all will to care about understanding the code or even what it does.
If slop coding is so great why is everyone so adamant about hiding it from users?
If you’re not willing to disclose something, maybe take that as a hint.
because yall gonna go on a witch hunt at a whiff of llm, regardless of the final code or product quality?
Somehow you consider even a little pushback crazy but won’t listen to people when they ask you not to jump into AI madness headfirst wearing blinders?
when they ask you not to jump into AI madness headfirst wearing blinders?
That’s not what you’re asking and they are not doing that. The policy is quite sane. Ye of little faith (in the developers) were perfectly fine using this free software these same people wrote beforehand, but now according to the general sentiment in the comments they have all suddenly turned into idiots who don’t know what they’re doing and we should all abandon KDE etc etc.
I feel like using ai is like using drugs, they’re bad, but regulating them is muuuuuuuch better than just prohibiting, people will use it anyways.
It’s not a one to one comparison but I feel encouraging witch hunts will definitely do more harm than normalizing it.
To be clear, I don’t want it either, I’m acknowledging it’s the lesser of two evils.
I’m 12 and this is deep level of take right here
I feel like using ai is like using drugs, they’re bad, but regulating them is muuuuuuuch better than just prohibiting, people will use it anyways.
crime won’t happen because it is illegal?
As a user, I think this is the biggest issue I have with this policy. Disclosure is a big part of open source and hiding whatever tools are used is fundamentally against that philosophy.
Would you be willing to expand on what you mean by disclosure being a big part of open source?
I ask because it has not been my experience that OSS developers have ever had a habit of disclosing what tools they use. If you are lucky then a repo has instructions for contributors, that may describe tools being used, or CI configuration for running tests and linters, but most projects have neither. Mostly you just get instructions for building the project, but sometimes not even that
In some projects you’ll see a kind of a colophon section listing all the tools used in making some software. Not just obviously things like libraries, but OS, text editor, IDE, art tools, or even inspirations.
It’s not everywhere, but it’s frequent enough, and different from how proprietary software credits (or doesn’t) to make it a distinction imo.
Because users are dumdums who chimp out at the smallest of changes and mindlessly rebel just to feel important?
I feel like you’re describing the people who are crazy about AI right now.
Having an public policy that permits the use of LLMs feels like the opposite of “hiding it”. If a project has such a policy, then you can be pretty sure that LLMs are being used, even if you cannot tell exactly what commits involved the use of LLMs. It’s probably also a lot more discoverable than disclosures in commits or PRs, which most users wouldn’t know how to look for
How would you even enforce it. Its possible to make extensive use of local LLMs and have them write no code at all that you submit. Is that use of AI? Should it be disclosed? If you did you would get puritans calling it slop regardless of the result too.
Realistically, I think everything actively maintained is going to have some LLM code in it by now. You can either accept it or go mad, tbh.
Art is one thing, and I can see why we wouldn’t want the computer doing that if you have the resources to employ people, but code is rarely art. Most of it was already slop. It’s had things shoehorned into it by shouty managers decades ago. Claude is far from perfect, but so are most of the people doing the gruntwork.
I can accept some trace amount of rat shit is going to get into my granola, but I am not willing to say that means I’m allowing rat shit in my cereal.
Please at least try to keep it out, as I do when I’m making my own granola. Yes I know it’s hard, but let’s just try.
Most of it was already slop. It’s had things shoehorned into it by shouty managers decades ago.
Manager: You have to get this done by end of week…
Dev: itll be really shitty and kind of work. Can we clean it up after?
Manager: of course!
Dev: its done, we can ship it. Ill start cleaning it up.
Manager: No, you need to do this other thing by tomorrow!
Ive had some good ones that did honor the agreement when pushed to rush things, but its not common.
“accept it or go mad” always just comes across as extremely desperate, lol
nooooo you don’t understand you HAVE to accept it! There’s no other choice!! Nooo stop rejecting it you’re not allowed to do that!!!
You can reject it in your own projects. That’s about it. If you’re open source and accepting any submissions, you’ve no idea if they’re LLM generated or not.
You have no idea if they copy pasted proprietary code either, but you try your best to keep it out.
Except for all the open source libraries you probably use that also use LLMs, or you find a blog post someone wrote explaining how to do something and they used LLMs
You can avoid direct knowledgeable usage, but you’ll still have LLM code in your codebase.
The stupidity of bandwagoners is on full display in this comment section.
You cannot tell from the code necessarily anyway so anti-AI policies are hard to enforce. In the end the developer (or AI wielding human) is responsible for the code quality and its license which is what matters. All this discussion feels just like the usual culture war dividing the community. I’m more concerned about the intentions of people adding fuel to the fire.
In the end the developer (or AI wielding human) is responsible for the code quality and its license which is what matters.
They literally may not have any control over the license, that is one of the many big problems people have. Please read the article linked by OP about the copyrightabilty of LLM generated code - https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html. It depends heavily on how they used the LLM, so if there is zero disclosure required the entire project could get into licensing hell down the road.
Yes obviously the code you commit must be yours and you need to make sure it is. That is already a rule, what’s the point of telling people how to work above that?
Due to the nature of LLMs being trained on existing code there is a chance that generated code is lifted verbatim from another piece of software whose license doesn’t permit the copy without attribution. Its a potential legal minefield that I think FOSS project should just steer clear of until the legal landscape surrounding generative AI cools off some.
deleted by creator
Yeah, the people getting upset at this are dumb as rocks.
So many people say they reject AI, but then how can you even use desktop Linux?
The kernel & the popular browsers have an increasing number of AI contributions, there is no escaping this.
Modern society is built on destruction and cruelty. Doesn’t mean I can advice somebody to give up living in society and sound smart.
To suggest that “compromising on ideals for practicality” is the same as “roll-over and accept it” is dishonest and only done by people who want to win the argument by attrition so they get what they want.
deleted by creator
As it is impossible to completely avoid AI use with Linux, I must content myself with only minimization instead of complete elimination, as I won’t let the pursuit of perfection mean I just give up entirely. Any reduction is still meaningful, just as it’s still worthwhile to minimize fossil fuel usage and meat consumption as much as is reasonably possible.
This is all completely out of your control. You cannot tell people how to work in opensource and projects are completely unable to control if someone uses AI (or which one) to perform tasks, since it is not visible in the result. The easiest thing for you to do, if you don’t want to take part in it, is to put down your phone and go outside.
…No it isn’t? I can choose what software I use, there are projects making efforts to avoid AI as much as is possible, and most contributors tend to follow guidelines, so having no-AI rules, while not 100% effective at avoiding AI code, will still drastically reduce what gets in, which is all I’m aiming for, and which is absolutely achievable.
I’ve noticed that virtually all Pro-AI people are constantly pushing this idea that resistance is futile, and that we all just have to accept AI into all aspects of our lives, almost like a cult. I even saw some if that rhetoric in the KDE proposal this thread is about.
You can drink the AI koolaid as much as you want, but you’re not going to stop me from trying to limit it in my life wherever possible, and I’ll continue to advocate for others to abstain for a multitude of reasoned arguments as well.
I’m personally trying to switch to NetBSD. But, it’s not going well. My laptop can’t right-click in X under NetBSD, e.g.
A lot of the ecosystems I used to enjoy and support, I simply can’t anymore. Firefox, Linux, GHC, Debian, KDE, etc., etc. It’s a distressing time for me.
Can relate, everything I used to think of as a safe haven, a return to 90’s style computing, is seemingly being corrupted, and the few remaining options we have require a rather big sacrifice in usability.
time to stop donating then. Ai crap results in death by a thousand cuts.
Good. Fuck ludites.
Why?
the policy in question:
The golden rule for LLM usage in KDE is Don’t be lazy:
-
Don’t try to use a tool to replace your own judgment, interpersonal communication, or learning process.
-
Don’t take unsustainable shortcuts.
-
Don’t avoid growing as a person.
The result will be poor-quality work that eventually becomes someone else’s problem.
Nobody in KDE should know if you use an LLM — not because you’re concealing it, but because your usage of it produces output indistinguishable from what you could produce yourself. Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed.
Using an LLM to generate contributions
KDE follows a “human in the loop” principle: you must be making decisions and adjustments beyond mere prompting. The output must express your unique humanity in some way.
- Don’t be a “meat proxy”. For example:
- Don’t submit throwaway LLM-created changes as a “first draft or proof-of-concept for maintainers to improve”.
- Don’t submit “vibe-coded” changes you don’t understand and couldn’t make yourself.
- Don’t disclose LLM usage as a way of trying to excuse the potential errors or poor quality of a contribution that you haven’t put much effort into.
- Don’t add “Assisted-by: [some LLM]” tags to your commits; it’s just free advertising for the LLM’s provider.
(emphasis original, except for the fourth bullet point)
“You are responsible for the code you submit, regardless of tools used.”
Literally the same stance Linus had on Linux. I’m okay with it as long as it’s enforced.
Yes, that’s fine. And it’s also easy to enforce - just treat any code as if it’s written by a human (except obviously machine generated code like hardware descriptions etc).
Being against AI and LLMs is all fine and dandy, but it kinda takes ridiculous shape now.
However, I would prefer if open source tools would only allow the usage of open weight models and self-hosted systems. But then again, that’s my idealism talking.
I hate vibe coding, detest it, i’m tired of it. it wastes time and resources. That being said I use AI for debugging and as a glorified rubber duck. I don’t let it write ANYTHING but I will allow it to review code and make suggestions. Generally, I’d say 8 times out of 10 the suggestions are garbage BUT it will lead me down the right path. it’s a rubber duck that can talk back. So in that regards it has improved my build times, it has sped me up without actually touching the code itself.
THAT’s what AI/LLMs SHOULD be used for. an assistant that doesn’t directly interact with the project. a consultant to your code if you will.
unfortunately many people can’t make that separation and they sit on both sides of the fence.
LLMs are great for rubberducking and diagnosis, forensics, and the like.
We all know the enforcement won’t match the usage, but I’m still ok with the decision.
This seems fine
This isn’t a bad policy, but outright ignoring ethical and environmental concerns doesn’t seem very wise either. That should still be discussed, even if this becomes the final version of the policy.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Don’t go saying “well chatgpt said it”, no, you are responsible for it.
This seems fine to me, it’s all they can really do since banning AI entirely just isn’t possible; someone could use it and submit very high quality code and no one would know AI was involved.
And if its very high quality, does it matter?
There are more concerns beyond the quality of the code itself, such as the ones I listed here
i like how people exaggerated this into “oh no, KDE is s|op now”. I totally get the hate for greedy and overhyping ai corpos, but if this policy is a sign of slop, you a) most probably never coded anything in your life b) unaware that before ai-slop there was natural, human-produced™ slop and dumb stackoverflow copypasta that barely even worked.
It’s that humans cannot be trusted to not take shortcuts and AI has proven time and time again to be a literal gambling machine that uses persuasive writing techniques to convince you of things you wouldn’t otherwise think.
KDE is also fighting transparency which is terrible.
It’s not going to be shocking when KDE starts performing worse. If more than one person works on a project and you’re just hoping people use things responsibly, you’re dreaming.
Humans optimize everything and AI pretends to be the greatest optimization tool of all time while it spits spaghetti code it’s authors understand less of over time while it tells them "great idea! I’ll get to work right away!
you couldn’t trust humans to not take shortcuts long before the advent of ai. That’s the point of my previous comment.
KDE’s stance is literally “as long as the code is of sufficient quality and you’re able to take the responsibility over it, we don’t care which tools you were using along the way”. Policing people over what they’re (not) allowed to use never yielded positive results.
If anything, such policy allows less slop to slip through, than in any project with anti-ai policy, simply because the maintainers would be aware of the possibility, and thus would have to pay closer attention to the PR quality.
Finally, it’s an open source project. Even if anything sloppy slips past the eyes of maintainers, rather sooner than later it would be noticed by the community and fixed.
[…] AI pretends to be the greatest optimization tool of all time […]
Which is obvious to you, me, and trust me when i say that it’s obvious to anybody who ever tried using ai for even the most minor coding tasks harder than webdev.
One small problem: People are now also using AI to generate summaries of their vibe coded garbage, to push them through checks.
Using an LLM to generate text
Generally, don’t. What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don’t do it. This includes:
- Don’t use an LLM to “organize your thoughts” and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself.
- Don’t use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself.
- Don’t use an LLM to generate a reply to someone’s question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.
emphasis mine
deleted by creator
-
This is EXTREMELY disappointing. KDE is my favourite DE.
This. Dunno where I’m going to go once KDE starts collapsing under the weight of AI slop. XFCE maybe? Do they have an AI policy? What’s Cosmic looking like these days?
Xfce have embraced AI with their new Wayland compositor.
Cosmic accepts AI code, but according to them, they take a preemptively hostile view toward AI code submissions and will rewrite some parts by hand.
There’s some lists linked in the comments here of DE’s that reject all AI.
Maybe you should reconsider your outdated views instead. Why are you even using linux to begin with, considering the kernel also allows “ai slop”?
Outdated views, huh? Tell me you’re deluded without telling me.
Not sure how this affects what I said. Having an anti-ai policy simply doesn’t work, you’d know that if you worked on any open source projects at all. There’s a reason all sane projects, like linux and now kde, end up accepting AI code. You can keep retreating to the next DE/WM until there’s none left but the ultra niche whose entire point is it doesn’t use AI, but it also has no contributor.
That’s like telling a vegan to update their views and eat meat.
There are many legitimate reasons to want to avoid AI code and avoid encouraging corporate AI use. Not all of us have to adopt your views on AI.
The differerence is being a vegan affects you, and the world is pretty accomodating to it. Vegan options everywhere these days. Non-AI repos are getting ultrarare and will only get more so.
Using a project with AI code simply doesn’t affect you. KDE is open source, using it doesn’t contribute to anything, doesn’t encourage and AI corporation, doesn’t contribute to water/power usage during training, etc… If the maintainers check the PRs propely you won’t be affected whatsoever.
X2
Do you want to say Kde was your fav DE.
World sees AI doing awful things like nudifying children, making nearly every software we use worse, and stealing the world’s knowledge to sell back to us, and generally dislikes AI.
Moronic software devs with massive egos: "WE SHOULD USE AI SEE HOW EASY THIS MAKES MY LIFE NOW I DONT HAVE TO LEARN. "
Also them: “I swear I just use it to augment my work! I’d never take a shortcut and eventually keep taking shortcuts and outsource my thinking! Humans notoriously NEVER take shortcuts!”
Guys wtf are we even doing anymore.
AI is not a thing, it doesn’t act, it doesn’t think. Humans do. Humans nudify children, humans enshitify software, humans steal content
it doesn’t act,
I don’t disagree with anything else you are saying or the sentiment, but with the rise of “AI Agents” it is becoming more common that the AI actually does something. It seems like there is a new story every few days about an agent deleting an entire database or buying plane tickets or sending an e-mail to the FBI. Unfortunately, we have people giving it more and more permissions and ability to “just act” and it is only getting worse.
Most of those ‘news’ stories are sensationalized to the point of fiction.
Exactly.
All of the Anti-AI people are actually anti-capitalists, they’re just not finished diagnosing the problem.
AI isn’t building data centers, capitalists are. They’re doing it in such a destructive and rapid manner because they’re trying to leverage their infinite amount of cash into a future monopoly. If it wasn’t AI it would have been some other product.
Fighting the product and ignoring the actual human beings who are making these destructive decisions is only adding to the smoke screen that shifts blame away from names like Huang, Altman, and Musk.
I think you can be anticapitalist and also anti-AI. I’m certainly both
I think you can be anticapitalist and also anti-AI. I’m certainly both
Yes, the venn is basically a circle.
All of the ‘bad things AI is doing’ are bad things that capitalists are doing.
Nobody is actually angry at AI for solving age old mathematical problems, folding proteins or locating cancers. It’s not the technology that people care about.
People are angry at rapacious capitalism and are misdirecting it at the technology and not the rapacious capitalists. Anti-AI is just Anti-Capitalism for new leftists.
Same here! I don’t care who is responsible for it, no matter where on the political spectrum the creators are, I’m still not supporting it.
You sound like “Guns don’t kill people! Robbers do!”
So I’m going to ask you, would you give a gun to a child? Would you? Just answer that
Except AI won’t kill you
What in the bullshit bad faith non sequitor is this.
And it wrecks the environment, and it stunts the user’s intelligence without actually being able to do anything truly original or novel, and it makes worse, buggier, less secure, less maintainable software. The list goes on and on
Actual proposed policy:
Nobody in KDE should know if you use an LLM — not because you’re concealing it, but because your usage of it produces output indistinguishable from what you could produce yourself. Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed.
Generally, don’t. What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don’t do it. This includes:
Don’t use an LLM to “organize your thoughts” and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself. Don’t use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself. Don’t use an LLM to generate a reply to someone’s question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.
The one acceptable usage is to write text in your native language and then machine-translate it into English, with no stylistic or tonal changes.
But of course reading is for the LLM, it’s far better to be outraged about ‘hopping on the Pro-AI train’.
That section only relates to descriptions of pull requests, not the AI code itself. They don’t want long rambly AI generated explanations of how the code works, but they are fine if the code itself is AI generated.
Yeah, I forgot to paste part about the code.
this is quite… disappointing, and I say that as someone who uses primarily GNOME :(
I’ll likely be switching my gaming PC to Gnome due to all this :\
(on a side note, the Gnome dev in that thread mentions that Gnome bans AI usage, but I haven’t been able to find anything that confirms that, and AFAICT Gnome doesn’t have an official AI usage policy, only Gnome Circle does for 3rd party Gnome Extensions).
She’s updated the comment now to say ‘a lot of us outright ban’, which is more accurate.
Just a side note, GNOME Circle and Extensions are two different things (but both do ban AI projects). Circle is a way for GNOME to say a third party app is good, while Extensions are like browser extensions but for the DE.
the Gnome dev in that thread mentions that Gnome bans AI usage, but I haven’t been able to find anything that confirms that
You can bet your behind that the developers employed by IBM Red Hat are 100% using LLMs to code. Chances are they are even mandated by corporate higher-ups to do so.
Red hat is a big contributor to gnome? I didn’t know that.
Is the default DE for fedora so it makes sense
Yeah, that I did know
are you switchong off linix since the linu kernel allows ai?
As it is impossible to completely avoid AI use with Linux, I must content myself with only minimization instead of complete elimination, as I won’t let the pursuit of perfection mean I just give up entirely. Any reduction is still meaningful, just as it’s still worthwhile to minimize fossil fuel usage and meat consumption as much as is reasonably possible.
deleted by creator
you realize ai is just the tool and isnt a data center. data centers exist with out ai and ai exists with out data centers
I do not think LLMs can be “just a tool”.
Most LLM use is with corporate AI, and this KDE policy explicitly allows corporate AI usage. If they had restricted it to only open-source local models, I wouldn’t have nearly as many environmental concerns (though that would not solve the plagiarism issue).
For a more complete look at all of the downsides of AI usage, I’d encourage you to take a look at this comment.
“If they had restricted it to only open-source local models”
Is this even remotely enforceable? Stylometry can pretty effectively determine between AI and human written text ( not sure about code specifically since those are much stricter languages), but can it tell the difference between models or even if the LLM was run locally? (almost certainly not in the latter case).
Most contributors generally respect the rules of a project, and there are other rules put in place that are also not technically enforceable, such as asking a contributor to not submit copyrighted code (this would be virtually impossible for a reviewer to distinguish if it came from a closed source project), which also gives the project a stronger defense if brought to court, as they can then at least point to the rules and show where a contributor willfully broke them. In comparison, I suspect a court would not look kindly on a policy that says “Don’t disclose that you used a tool that has a 3 to 10% chance of introducing plagiarized copyrighted code with every prompt to avoid being shamed.”
As an example, the WINE project has a rule to not allow anyone who has even seen Windows source code from contributing to the project. This is to avoid the chances of someone subconsciously or consciously submitting a reproduction of what they saw in the Windows source code, and thus hopefully prevent the project being sued into oblivion from Microsoft (who would likely love to see that happen).
Adding a stipulation in the guidelines that contributors can only use more-ethical LLMs likely wouldn’t entirely prevent someone breaking that rule, but by in large, it is likely that most would adhere to it, making it an effective rule despite being difficult to enforce.
