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.

This seems fine

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.

One small problem: People are now also using AI to generate summaries of their vibe coded garbage, to push them through checks.

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(tm) slop and dumb stackoverflow copypasta that barely even worked.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

X2

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#desktop-environments

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#window-managers

tl;dr:

• Lumina, Lumina NG, and GNOME (not mentioned) are good choices of DE
• bspwm, River, Sway, and Openbox are good choices of WM. The two options in bold have anti-AI policies, while the rest are simply untainted. Openbox is safer than the rest, as it has been feature-complete since 2010, and therefore only gets occasional patches.
• Niri has also recently changed its policy to ban the use of AI. It is unclear whether they will still use it for code reviews, but from the perceived tone of the text, this will probably also stop.

Edit: Good find @heliotrope@slrpnk.net, that list increases our options significantly.

This list contains the only some known DE's that openly reject AI. Basically just a couple window managers.

Pretty much every major full blown DE accepts or uses AI. Gnome and Cinnamon have no official stances

BSD.

Linux has reasonable use of AI permitted.

The contribution policy is the only place where anything meaningful can be done, as that is ultimately what will influence developers trying to contribute. Putting environmental concerns anywhere else is, IMHO, just toothless virtue signalling.

I personally consider advocating for non-disclosure of AI use to be Pro-AI. Advocating for disclosure but still allowing it would be neutral.

I don't really see why environmental policy shouldn't be mentioned in the contribution policy. If it's there as the justification for why a part of the policy exists and it is accurate about what the environmental impacts actually are, it seems to fit in fine within the policy? Not wanting the point there doesn't make KDE pro-AI (since they might just want to mention it elsewhere), but it is valid criticism if they don't acknowledge it anywhere.

However I do feel that the other points in the post are weaker. KDE's stance is in line with what the SFC recommends when it comes to AI in FOSS, specifically around contributions. I came across the SFC recommendations a while back and it's held up well in similar discussions so far: https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html

Devs rejecting any notion of transparency by disclosing AI usage in code submissions

I don't think they rejected the transparency part? I agree that transparency is necessary. Rather their reply is telling the commenter to not shun people. Both of those points are reflected in the SFC recommendations (point 5 on disclosure and point 3 on shunning)

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

I get the feeling that KDE does not curate much of anything, for better or for worse. There is a good bit of content in the KDE ecosystem that is outdated or straight up shovelware.

On top of that, Akademy is a conference that is intended for discussion, rather than a presentation about KDE.

Akademy features a 2-day conference with presentations on the latest KDE developments, followed by 4 days of workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) and coding sessions. It is an opportunity to meet key KDE contributors, learn about the latest features and enjoy the great atmosphere. You will meet developers, artists, translators, upstream and downstream maintainers, users, and free and open software industry leaders from all over the world

It wouldn't work well if they had to curate every presentation at such an event. It is indeed deceitful to imply that the presenter is going to change the direction of KDE if in reality they rarely contribute and have little say in the direction of KDE. Also IMO it's good that they let that guy participate in the conversation because it let everyone else raise points about why the idea is bad.

Be quiet, we're trying to be mad about AI.

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

AI is not a thing, it doesn't act, it doesn't think. Humans do. Humans nudify children, humans enshitify software, humans steal content

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.

what can they do despite ban LLM usage altoguether (and per consequence get LLM generated code submitted anyway), they can't have a blacklist for models, or force contributors to run them on their local hardware.

But they can? Like OP pointed out, wine forbids contributions from those that have seen Windows source code. How in the world are they supposed to enforce that? Turns out the open source community is pretty good at self enforcing.

KDE is huge, you can't just fork all of it (of course technically you could, but it is not much use). You maybe could fork individual projects, a bit like https://vim-classic.org/

I was thinking of having some kind of online list for packages without AI stuff. Of course a 100% slop free desktop installation is probably impossible nowadays, it would still be interesting to see how far one can go.