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2 | 2 | title: Generative AI Policy |
3 | 3 | --- |
4 | 4 |
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5 | | -It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred |
6 | | -to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, |
7 | | -particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement. |
8 | | - |
9 | | -The use of Slop Generators in _any_ contribution to the Asahi Linux project is |
10 | | -expressly forbidden. Their use in any material capacity where code, documentation, |
11 | | -engineering decisions, etc. are largely created with the "help" of a Slop Generators |
12 | | -will be met with a single warning. Subsequent disregard for this policy will be |
13 | | -met with an immediate and permanent ban from the Asahi Linux project and all |
14 | | -associated spaces. |
15 | | - |
16 | | -## Illegal output |
17 | | -All of the popular Slop Generators are trained on an incomprehensibly large corpus |
18 | | -of text. There is ample evidence across the Web of this training material including |
19 | | -copyrighted material, brazenly stolen by the Slop Generator proprietors with |
20 | | -impunity. Due to the nature of Slop Generators, they are prone to regurgitating |
21 | | -their training corpus almost verbatim. This presents a challenge for FOSS projects |
22 | | -in that the use of generated slop is highly likely to violate intellectual property |
23 | | -law by way of regurgitating the aforementioned stolen training material. This |
24 | | -likelihood is proportional to the specificity of the problem area. |
25 | | - |
26 | | -Asahi Linux is a _highly_ specific project, working in esoteric problem spaces |
27 | | -on publicly undocumented hardware. Given the techniques used by Slop Generator |
28 | | -manufacturers, it is not impossible for them to have confidential or leaked |
29 | | -material owned by Apple or its vendor partners in their training corpi. It is |
30 | | -therefore likely that Slop Generators will regurgitate this when queried in just |
31 | | -the right way. We already forbid the use of illegally acquired or leaked |
32 | | -documentation and tooling (e.g. Apple's internal repair diagnostic tools). This |
33 | | -also applies to regurgitated slop. |
34 | | - |
35 | | -FOSS projects like Asahi Linux cannot afford costly intellectual property lawsuits |
36 | | -in US courts. The current political situation in that nation also makes it |
37 | | -incredibly unlikely that any FOSS project would win such a suit regardless of |
38 | | -the quality of its defence. |
39 | | - |
40 | | -## Waste of resources |
41 | | -Slop Generators consume an unfathomable amount of resources we can scarcely afford |
42 | | -to waste. Training, and to a lesser extent inference, require enormous amounts of |
43 | | -energy, water, land, and hardware. Manufacturing the hardware itself requires enormous |
44 | | -amounts of energy, water and minerals. All parts of the Slop Generator supply chain |
45 | | -are environmentally intensive. These resources are better used on quite literally |
46 | | -anything else. |
47 | | - |
48 | | -## LMGTFY |
49 | | -An emerging trend we have observed is people copying user questions or posts into |
50 | | -a Slop Generator, then replying to the post with the generated slop. This is |
51 | | -occurring with increasing frequency, particularly on Reddit. For some people it |
52 | | -is tempting to "help" others and answer questions by feeding them to a LLM and |
53 | | -then posting the answer as-is, or lightly edited at best. If this is you, please |
54 | | -realise that others also have access to the same models as you do, and if they |
55 | | -wanted an answer from one, they could have asked it themselves. Doing this is |
56 | | -exactly as helpful as posting a LMGTFY link, and everyone else _will_ view your |
57 | | -actions as if you did exactly that. |
58 | | - |
59 | | -## It's just matmul |
60 | | -It is very easy to get caught up in the hype that bad actors have built around |
61 | | -Slop Generators. The anthropomorphic presentation of Slop Generators as "agents" |
62 | | -or "assistants" is a very deliberate attempt to manufacture consent for their |
63 | | -integration into workforces at the expense of human interaction. The implication |
64 | | -of some higher degree intelligence or sentience is very much deliberate, and it |
65 | | -is very much false. |
66 | | - |
67 | | -Make no mistake, they cannot think. They cannot reason. They cannot take into |
68 | | -account context. They don't "know" things or have a sense of humour or any of the |
69 | | -other human-centric qualities bad actors would have you believe of them. Slop |
70 | | -Generators are a [chain of matrices in a stochastic system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain). |
71 | | -The output of a Slop Generator is nothing more than a statistical calculation, |
72 | | -where the next word to be generated is decided by an opaque probabilistic |
73 | | -function dependent on previously generated words. This is fundamentally the |
74 | | -same mathematics that is used to predict the weather. |
75 | | - |
76 | | -A Slop Generator cannot assess the veracity of its claims, nor can it ever |
77 | | -tell you that it simply does not know something. Slop Generators |
78 | | -are often _confidently incorrect_ as a result, and require brow-beating |
79 | | -to admit a mistake. They are therefore highly inappropriate tools in contexts where |
80 | | -truth and correctness are of utmost importance, and when the user is not already |
81 | | -highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area. This presents a bit of |
82 | | -an issue for Slop Generators; if the user is already highly knowledgeable and |
83 | | -confident in the problem area, then why ask the Slop Generator in the first place? |
| 5 | +This page has moved to [https://asahilinux.org/slop](https://asahilinux.org/slop) |
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