Disallow or discourage use of "AI" tools (Christoph Cullmann)

[Justin Zobel]

On 19/05/2025 15:01, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
> On Mon, 2025-05-19 at 14:53 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
>> On 19/05/2025 14:35, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 2025-05-19 at 10:03 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 18/05/2025 16:41, Albert Vaca Cintora wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, 18 May 2025, 08:59 Justin Zobel, <justin at 1707.io> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> If the contributor cannot tell you the license(s) of the code 
>>>>>> that was used to generate the code, then it's literally gambling 
>>>>>> that this code wasn't taken from another project by Gemini and 
>>>>>> used without their permission or used in a way that violates the 
>>>>>> license and opens up the KDE e.V. to litigation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm no lawyer but I would expect that training AI will fall under 
>>>>> fair use of copyrighted code. If that's not the case already, it 
>>>>> will probably be soon. The benefits of AI to society are too large 
>>>>> to autoimpose such a roadblock.
>>>>>
>>>>> Albert
>>>>
>>>> From my understanding (what others have told me), AI generally does 
>>>> not produce good quality code though. So how is that a benefit to 
>>>> society?
>>>>
>>> I wrote some lengthy answer here, but then I scratched that because 
>>> I realized your question can really generate tons of lengthy replies 
>>> that no one will read 😅 I will say you that: AI is useful for 
>>> simple and tedious tasks. In general, you don't expect that AI will 
>>> complete correctly whatever you asked it to do. Instead you expect 
>>> it to give you some useful base, which you can change/correct/modify 
>>> to fit whatever you actually need.
>>>
>>> Like, I dunno, do you have a friend in a foreign country who you 
>>> want to write a recent story, but the story is in english? You ask 
>>> AI to translate it, which will be don "almost good", so what you do 
>>> then is you go over the text and correct everything to match your 
>>> style. This is faster than translating everything manually. In fact, 
>>> it well matches what people-translators were doing for decades: they 
>>> typically translate texts in two phases, one is sort of writing a 
>>> scratch, and the other one is polishing, like adding suitable 
>>> idioms, etc.
>>
>> The problem is we're not talking about text here, we're talking about 
>> code and code has licenses, on which language models don't care 
>> about. I'm all for AI that helps humanity, but stealing code or using 
>> code that is incompatible with KDE's license set is not it.
>>
>> I want AI to solve world hunger, prevent disease and help me do the 
>> housework :)
>>
>
> Well, you asked how "low quality AI code" benefits society. I have 
> many different examples, I came up with one related to translation 
> because it was the simplest one to describe (all others resulted in 
> too much text) and its morally equivalent, because you similarly get 
> poor low-quality base and you improve upon it.
>
> If you want code examples specifically: another simple one that comes 
> to my mind is I have in my Emacs config a code that allows to quit 
> emacsclient with vim-command `xb` and upon doing so it converts 
> Markdown code to bbcode. And there's also similar one for textile. The 
> "conversion code" is a terrible O(n²) algorithm written by AI, which 
> didn't even work when AI wrote it. But I fixed it (as in, made it 
> work), and use it just fine at work to write Markdown text and then 
> insert into to either Redmine or Bitrix at their native markup. Don't 
> care much for O(n²), because for amounts of texts I write it is 
> instantaneous.
>
> Another example is I had to rewrite some project from one language to 
> another at work. This is tedious task, so I similarly used AI to 
> create a scratch, and then I went over that code refactoring it and 
> fixing.

Translations are not code.
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