I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an AI buff. I use it (unpaid) mostly for a search aid or assistance with setting up services in my homeserver (new to homelabbing) when I get stuck, as I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to it due to life obligations.
My question is: Do you feel it is ethical and/or moral to use AI to develop FOSS?
I’m genuinely torn on this issue. Part of me feels it’s counterintuitive, yet the another part of me knows the probability of it going away are slim to none and using it to develop FOSS is a way to “use it against itself”, for lack of a better term.
This is my first post on Lemmy. I’m asking to please keep it cordial. I’m not looking for an elitist lecture. I genuinely want to know the community’s thoughts.
P.S. I’ve toyed with local models, but I don’t have the hardware to make them remotely useful. I’m still learning and tweaking to see what can be achieved on limited hardware.
Personally, I think that using LLMs is a terrible idea, especially for Free Software. It creates a reliance on proprietary software[^1]. Generated code has uncertain provenance, for the same reason that researchers can provoke LLMs to "auto-complete" famous books, undermining the license. LLMs rewrite instead of fixing, since the latter requires intelligence, so it makes less-maintainable code. And studies show that using models slows work down, rather than speeding it up.
[^1]: Yeah, some claim to have open source licenses, and the OSI is desperately trying to figure out how to approve AI-specific licenses. But since there's no (useful) way to modify the model without the training data, it's proprietary.
I've only found two arguments in favor: The technology is (allegedly) here to stay. And sure, the studies say that it slows down work, creates bugs in most of its changes, makes everything harder to maintain, alienates the team, and erodes skill, but don't worry, because I have a system.
I wouldn't risk it on any project of mine, and especially not for anything released under a public license where it needs to promise people that they can use the code for any purpose.
Why do you think it's a reliance (without it things will break) rather than a substitutable service?
Two reasons, three if you include the footnote that already answers the reductive "substitutable service" idea. Thirty-plus years ago, Free Software developers often used proprietary compilers. That was reliance on proprietary products. This is relying on proprietary tools to generate code, unless we want to pretend that people are out there running A/B tests between hand-written and generated code. The tools also generate unmaintainable code while making the developers less capable, making the tools more necessary as teams use them, which also sounds like reliance.