Work items · Plasma / Plasma Workspace · GitLab
invent.kde.org
Various components needed to run a Plasma-based environment

Direct link to the LLM Policy Discussion: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/work_items/187

Example of KDE dev rejecting environmental consideration:

Example of KDE devs not wanting to require LLM use be disclosed.

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.

  • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    117·
    1 month ago

    the policy in question:

    The golden rule for LLM usage in KDE is Don’t be lazy:

    1. Don’t try to use a tool to replace your own judgment, interpersonal communication, or learning process.

    2. Don’t take unsustainable shortcuts.

    3. 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.

    1. Don’t be a “meat proxy”. For example:
    2. Don’t submit throwaway LLM-created changes as a “first draft or proof-of-concept for maintainers to improve”.
    3. Don’t submit “vibe-coded” changes you don’t understand and couldn’t make yourself.
    4. 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.
    5. 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)

    • yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca
      423·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org
      4015·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • Toga77@lemmy.world
        186·
        1 month ago

        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!

        • CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org
          114·
          1 month ago

          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.

    • Taasz/Woof@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      122·
      1 month ago

      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.

    • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net
      91·
      1 month ago

      Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Don’t go saying “well chatgpt said it”, no, you are responsible for it.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      81·
      1 month ago

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

      • Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        11·
        1 month ago

        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:

        1. Don’t use an LLM to “organize your thoughts” and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself.
        2. Don’t use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself.
        3. 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