@jasonaowen @zerodogg people aren't going to reply if there's nothing to add. ("+1" emails on mailing lists are obnoxious.) @demoographics said what they said and said it well

@zerodogg perhaps you can read through this post and let me know what you think. I'm not sure what the goal here is, other than asking for some sort of principled public statement https://cloudisland.nz/@ehashman/116178358384455284

@foolishowl @zerodogg what is the objection to specifically, though? Large language models as a technology, or specific vendors? Debian is never going to hand out licenses for an Anthropic or OpenAI product simply on the basis that they're proprietary software. But it's not like the project has ever *banned* the use of a paid, proprietary IDE to support one's work—how would it even know?

There exist LLMs trained on public, open data sets with public weights that can run on a personal machine, and would appear to be suitable for inclusion in Debian—are these tools also objectionable?

If the goal is "completely halt use of LLMs as a technology used in any form", I don't think it's realistic to expect Debian Developers to be able to accomplish this.

@zerodogg this line feels a bit cherry-picked at the expense of the larger point. The more relevant line, I think, is "Simply refusing to engage with widely used tools does not make them disappear; it only reduces our ability to shape how they are used within our project."

And I think this is a good summary of the issue. Debian may well end up voting for total abstinence from AI tools within the project, but that isn't e.g. going to stop upstream package sources from using them. If the Linux kernel is already incorporating AI-assisted code, what is the meaningful alternative? For a project that is basically just a middleman for distributing software, I don't think it's possible to avoid software "tainted" with AI in a meaningful way. That would effectively require large-scale human-only rewrites, for which Debian does not have the resources.