@neil A question that I ponder is why have those in favour of AI not forked to be (say) DebAIn? Nothing in the license prohibits that right? Seems like a quicker plan for all involved, although I think the final outcome (whatever that ends up being) would not change.

@neil

Unfortunately there's no guaruntee that someone working in open source is actually doing it because they think deeply about ethics or have a moral compass beyond "No one should tell me what to do on puter!"

@neil meanwhile, here I am, using Ubuntu, with a local AI installed in it through LM Studio to play around and learn how to use AI to inflate my resume and earn more money.

@neil I think I am a bit less surprised - I have seen a lot of pro-AI posts on Debian lists recently (not subscribed to, just other people have highlighted). I sadly think it's inevitable that genAI will make its way into pretty much every Linux distro that is widely used, in the same way as systemd did.

Having been an environmental campaigner in the past, I've also seen how easy it is for people to think 'well my emissions don't matter' (for whatever reason, e.g. China burns lots of coal).

@neil The environmental concerns are tricky; I'd condemn the crazy huge datacentre buildouts - but locally run AIs aren't that bad - and most people don't know the huge power usage of CI systems that we've depended on for decades; there's also lots of different types of AI usage - the 'agent' stuff is very heavy compute, reviewing code or small rework isn't that bad.

@neil I can't actually recommend that you wade in very far, but if you do, you will see that many developers voted for options that focused on environmental (and other harms) of AI. It just happens that the winning option chose to pretend those harms don't exist. It's like "shitty elected leader $Y of country $X"; as a non-$Y supporter you have to live not only with a shitty leader, but also the reputational damage to being from country $X.

@neil I am not overly surprised by this, it is a pragmatic rather than political approach. Banning LLM use is a lot harder (impossible) to police than the whole Debian "free software" stance.

It is a little disappointing that Debian of all distros couldn't have chosen to take a moral high ground on this though, as futile as it may be.

LLM/GenAI is super accessible, it has replaced search for many developers, because search is broken, the next step to having it generate code is a small shift from copy-pasting the odd line from docs or websites. So much coding is gluing together boilerplate and examples anyway. They could have "banned" GenAI use in Debian code, but this would never have stopped GenAI use in Debian code.

The current environmental and economic issues of LLM/GenAI are worth making a stand about though.

As a fairly pragmatic Debian user of some 30+ years I am conflicted. Though as a developer, for work purposes, I do make use of LLM tech — so I am myself tainted.

@neil I think "environmental harm" needs to come with some sort of disclaimer.

In the US, yeah, I have no idea how the way they're building datacenters there is legal.

Here in Sweden they run on 100% renewable energy and don't use up water.

I feel the whole environmental debate around LLMs has centered on what happens in the US, with very little actual data shown.

https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use

@neil It's such an interesting question, and I see several angles. As a user who can't code, Claude Code has let me make things which are incredibly niche, just for myself - a huge positive. On the other hand, would I want AI code in my OS? I wouldn't trust it that far, yet.

@neil Debian was the OS I planned to switch to, in part because I didn't see this coming either.
I probably should have given just how much it's infiltrated everything else and my cynicism over it.

I agree with what Elementary said: "you still have the problem of major underlying infrastructure including the Linux kernel itself. I think we have to take a harm reduction approach right now and do our best with what we have control over"

I don't have control over much, but I can change my OS.

@neil I wasn't particularly it must be said. Debian is primarily a librarian not a developer. Yes it has some development in the classic sense but it's basically an enormous library. Librarians tend to dislike excluding things, even bad things, or things from bad people.

@neil The question is if there are any distributions that committed not to use AI. Neither now, nor in the future.
And further more Debian is practically the standard on servers.

@neil

3) is by everyone. A couple of years back, my employer asked everyone how they got to work, because they "needed" it for some ESG report, but AI is excluded from newer reports (and that is even legal) and if you mention it, you just get a lecture about how AI is a necessity for the future of the company. My unwillingness to use it outside of very narrow field already got me in hot water.

4) As another log time user, I decided to wait what happens to both Linux and Debian for a while.

@neil not being very gifted when it comes to think before acting I moved half of my homelab to NetBSD while I think seriously what would be the next step I'll take.
I wish you luck and thanks for raising the subject.