Project:Council/AI policy

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The policy

Gentoo Council has voted on 2024-04-14 on the following policy:

It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.

This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.

Todo:

Link to the meeting summary once it's uploaded

Rationale

Copyright concerns. At this point, the regulations concerning copyright of generated contents are still emerging worldwide. Using such material could pose a danger of copyright violations, but it could also weaken Gentoo claims to copyright and void the guarantees given by copyleft licensing.
Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to review contributions and detect the mistakes resulting from the use of AI.
Ethical concerns. The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical concerns. Among them:
- Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models.
- Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.
- The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality.
- LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.