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.
The problem isn’t what can be done, the problem is what is being done. An AI in hands of a good developer can make that developer better - sure.
On the other hand what actually happens is equivalent to submitting code that doesn’t compile, except it’s not quite as easy to discover. The code does compile but it often is still bogus. Maybe it doesn’t solve the issue, maybe it does but in a round-about way, etc.
Legal and economical arguments aside I’m not saying “don’t use AI” - I’m saying “if you submit AI code - verify its work before making someone else verify its work”. And that means you need to know how to verify its work - just compiling and running isn’t enough.