GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.

We do not understand where you're coming from or why you're so incredibly angry with us. It's not justified and does not make sense.

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[–] 111 points 2 months ago (22 children)

I haven't dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There's a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to "use AI" on a project.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago* (4 children)

    I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of "AGI achieved", the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    On top of that, regardless of however you feel about AI, there are so many questions about copyright and ownership here, that as-of-yet remain untried and unanswered by the courts, that it's essentially impossible to know what the legal ramifications will turn out to be, when accepting "AI code" in your project. I definitely fear that it could turn out to be a sort of trojan horse against especially the GPL, and other copyleft licenses. I conaider it to be risky to use AI code, on that basis alone.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    True, but how will you prove that code was written by AI and not yourself? Any people can generate code, modify some variables to incorporate in their code, and it won't be any different than copying it from stackoverflow. Unless the code is written in a "very specific AI way" it won't be possible to distinguish.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Oh, I don't think any court would rule that using LLM generated code automatically infringes on the copyright of everyone whose text was used to train it, independently of the degree of similarity between the generated output and the original text(s).

    But LLMs have a habit of sometime, and not too infrequently either, reproducing parts of their training material verbatim, as their output. As long as it's only sufficiently small "snippets" of text or code, it's unlikely to raise significant copyright concerns - but the fact is that it's not actually that rare that an LLM will replicate larger sections of text from its training material, spanning across many lines. What's more, LLMs don't advise you of this, when their output is a replica of a significant part of an already-existing, copyrighted text. But you'll be infringing on somebody's copyright, whether you know it or not, irregardless of whether you aquired the text from an LLM or elsewise. That's a big liability to accept in a large project, that frequently uses LLM-generated code. It would be a minefield.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I'd hope that they will stick to non-retroactivity for new laws and rulings on AI, or else the world will have a giant mess on its hands. But I have the feeling that we're moving towards an eventual, enduring weakening of copyright law, which is totally fine by me. Copyright has done more harm than good to the world (imo).

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Usually, if it's noticeable that AI was used on code, the code is flawed or, at least, has copyright concerns.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    Agreed.

    I strongly remember a CompSci professor ~2005 being disgusted with auto-generated Java GUI. And yes it was clunky and more memory intensive than it could have been, but also, I really don't care about how GridView is defined most of the time.

    Bad code is bad code, touched by AI or not. For working code, a volunteer group spending resources to determine if it might have been touched by AI is at the very least an incredibly frustrating standard to try to meet. And very likely impossible to verify in any meaningful way.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    It's funny because anyone seeing this as black and white clearly hasn't ever opened an IDE.

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  • [–] 69 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (9 children)

    I've been a programmer for two thirds of my life up to this point. I don't see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the "hallucination" issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.

    If you're using AI for code generation, I hope you like reading code.

    If you're using AI to learn your way around an existing codebase, I hope you're prepared to fact check everything it tells you.

    If you're using AI for code review before merging a PR, fucking yikes. What made you think the sycophant machine that once told users a soggy cereal bar was a great business opportunity and cannot even transcribe McDonald's orders correctly was suitable for that purpose?

    If you're telling yourself it's okay because there's a human in the loop, please read some studies about attention fatigue and consider that increasing the number of critical decisions a person must make per day, while giving them a suggested answer that's right 90% of the time and catastrophically wrong the remaining 10%, and the only way to tell the difference is to read in depth, might not have the desired effect. Especially if the human in question is then put under time pressure.

    And all that is before I go on a five paragraph rant about the ethical transgressions of every major AI company.

    It's pretty black and white for me.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    I don’t see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the “hallucination” issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.

    quoted for emphasis. you have more patience than I do in telling sycophants why their take is idiotic.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

    The fact that it isn't perfect is the grey. And sure, it has a lot of problems but not only is it still useful anyways, but those problems are being ironed out. They probably won't disappear completely but the tech is already miles further than what we had 2 years ago.

    To make you understand what I mean by black and white, you have a user that put "AI is evil" in big bold letters in the comments. The hate is almost cult like for part of the population, and imo, it's mostly because the media tells them to be mad.

    Most of it depends on the task in any case. I don't work with massive code bases and it doesn't take long reading through a few scripts, running it and checking the output. The people I know that do work with huge code bases are using it as well, but I can't really talk for them either. They don't hate it tho.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    The person who put "AI is evil" in big block letters is objectively correct. See homes getting claimed under eminent domain to build power lines for datacenters, electricity prices for consumers rising as service quality gets worse, and water usage to the tune of millions of gallons per datacenter per day. See companies buying rare books in bulk, cutting them apart so they can be scanned faster, and not publishing the scans, literally destroying culture so they can have one more scrap of training data guaranteed to be free of slop that their competitors don't have. See companies operating web scrapers that deliberately evade every block that website owners try to use to stop them from reading their sites, and then scraping so many different pages so frequently that it's indistinguishable from a DDoS attack, hosting bills skyrocket, servers crash, indie webmasters pay the price for corporate greed. See xAI operating natural gas turbines on the property of their datacenter for extra electricity in flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act, spewing toxic smoke into the air and generating powerful, inaudible infrasound vibrations that have been linked to everything from nausea to irritability to hearing loss to seizures. See Anthropic treating Minority Report as an instruction manual. See how ChatGPT use affects test scores. See AI psychosis. See chatbot-induced suicides. See deskilling. See how little AI companies care.

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  • [+] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)
  • [–] -2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    Sorry, I don't bootlick the copyright machine. Anyone with half a brain can see it's transformative. I don't get why collage is fine but AI isn't, it's just copyright mega corps and data brokers that smell blood in the water. All the data isn't even owned by the artist, you are fighting for universal records, not your local guitarist.

    For the climate aspect, it's mostly grid issues and corruption. It's laughable to blame AI when we have president pedo prostrating himself in front of oil companies and destroying renewable projects. We need regulations and all that on where they can be placed and how they get powered, but in the end, it's just software. I could use AI 8 hours a day for my whole life and I still wouldn't be close to the damage one ticket to Europe does. It's a scape goat being served by a corrupt pro oil lobby.

    Don't get me wrong, I know what datacenters entail with the amount of people they serve, but if you look at it at an individual level, it's a drop in the bucket, or it would be if they weren't using plane turbines. We need regulations to curb the stupidity, but it's doesn't make it all inherently bad.

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  • [+] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)
  • [–] -3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I don't think the copyright thing is an issue.

    Climate wise, it's only an issue because of a corrupt administration, it's not a death blow to it. It's at the heart of it overblown by a reasonable measure imo.

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