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I cannot believe there even needs to be a “discussion” about “AI” slop,

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  I cannot believe there even needs to be a “discussion” about “AI” slop,  Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org> - 2026-02-19 06:20 +0100
    Re: I cannot believe there even needs to be a “discussion” about “AI” slop,  Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org> - 2026-02-19 06:50 +0100
      Re: Generative systems Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues <josch@debian.org> - 2026-02-19 12:50 +0100
      Re: Generative systems <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-02-22 11:10 +0100

#14227 — I cannot believe there even needs to be a “discussion” about “AI” slop,

but people asked to discuss it here. So let me fullquote two
very recent posts from the Fediverse, which sum it up better
in English than I can. Even just one ought to suffice.

> I've been wanting to write something lengthy about "AI" for a while,
> discussing the arguments for and against and arriving at a reasonable
> position, but I find myself completely unable to get past the most
> glaring point, which is that we are facing c̲a̲t̲a̲s̲t̲r̲o̲p̲h̲i̲c̲ ̲e̲c̲o̲s̲p̲h̲e̲r̲e̲
> c̲o̲l̲l̲a̲p̲s̲e̲ because of capitalist overconsumption. Our species is
> literally c̲o̲m̲m̲i̲t̲t̲i̲n̲g̲ ̲s̲u̲i̲c̲i̲d̲e̲ by c̲a̲p̲i̲t̲a̲l̲i̲s̲m̲ right in front of my eyes
> and the architects of the climate crisis have latched onto data
> centres with the energy budgets of countries running sycophantic
> Markov chains as their latest engine of short term profit extraction
> and people are split right down the middle either happily burning the
> world down to keep continvoucly morging or whatever the newest slop
> models tell them to do next, or existing in a state of angry refusal
> to believe that anything is wrong as everything crumbles into ash
> around them other than that some people have the wrong skin colour or
> gender presentation.
>
> *deep breath*
>
> The few of us who don't starve to death as our food sources collapse
> may eventually die of a̲s̲p̲h̲y̲x̲i̲a̲t̲i̲o̲n̲ when the wrong Amazon finishes
> burning down.
>
> How do you get past that?
>
> How does one even hope to connect with people who prioritise
> dismantling the structures of capitalism before it kills us all l̲o̲w̲e̲r̲
> than asking Claude for coding tips?
>
> I guess we know what the Great Filter is now.

 — https://social.treehouse.systems/@bodil/116093694360361788

Emphasis not mine. But hey, a physicist says it’s not “AI” which is
killing the planet, it’s the german move away from nuclear power and
towards renewables that is [sic!].

The second one is shorter but even more of a whammy:

> 🔗 https://stephvee.ca/blog/artificial%20intelligence/generative-ai-is-built-on-the-exploitation-of-the-global-south/
>
> New blog post on generative AI and the trauma endured by data labelers
> in the Global South. (CW: references to sexual abuse material and
> unsafe working conditions)

 — https://mastodon.social/@st3phvee/116094729007491217

(I’ve not read Steph’s blog post yet, but others that detail the same
situation in the past.)

I cannot understand how some even consider use of this worth considering
and try to distract those who resist with questionable-to-outright-false
argumentations about how it’s all legal (trust me, bro!) and inevitable¹
and how we as a project cannot enforce contributors to not use it. Which
in fact we can, by the way, it’s called DFSG/SC. It’s called plaing nice
and acting in good faith.

① oh, “inevitable”… I have a third post for you:

> This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and
> unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who
> don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s
> more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the
> unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict,
> racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment.
> This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers
> should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other
> to earn a chance at a decent life.

 — https://social.treehouse.systems/@jnkrtech/116083770527548518

Yet, someone with “community team” in the signature he chose to use for
the eMail wrote in a direct reply to me that calling out fashtech for
what it is (and the TESCREAL ideology behind it) is “uncalled for” and
that “you [I] know it”. Sorry, no. I’ve informed myself about this, and
I have seen more results of research about this than I ever wanted and
my opinion is that this is inacceptable, in so many ways, that we must
do something against it.

And we, as project, can. Among other very large FOSS projects, both
Gentoo and NetBSD have banned slop contributions. Just like that. And
so could Debian. Easily. And I fully expect my fellow DDs to adhere to
that and not knowingly or, worse, willingly, contribute slop, to main
or contrib, *or* to project infrastructure. (We ought to also remove
rsyslog, for that matter…)


I don’t expect to reply much (if I’m even allowed after this) here.
There has so much been said about this on Fedi already that I think
pointing y’all there if you weren’t will be enough (and if you were
and still consider slop maybe-acceptable, then I ask you whether you
really have been participating). And I don’t have the energy for long
discussions in English.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
  “Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having
          a peeing section in a swimming pool.”
						-- Edward Burr

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#14228

Dixi quod…

>I don’t expect to reply much (if I’m even allowed after this) here.

… but I think I have to make one addition. I don’t normally read the
list (too much traffic, not enough spoons), but I wanted to see on
the webinterface whether the mail made it through, and I saw the mail
from peb.

The legalities aspect (when not used as distraction or waved away) is
a bit misrepresented.

Yes, the TDM exception gives an exception to copyright for the training
of models… to analyse things, for trends and the likes. Nowhere does
this allow using the models to produce output. And please, do not use
the word “generate”, they don’t generate (generative art is something
entirely different and good), they regurgitate. LLMs are a sort of
lossy compressor/decompressor, with the decompression attempting a best
*average* match to continue the “prompt” (it’s really just autocomplete
with sparks).
https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/ demonstrated
very nicely how they actually work, using an actually obtainable model
as example.

Incidentally, this is also why their output alone is not copyrightable
as a new work: it is produced by a deterministic machine, not a human,
and therefore does not pass threshold of originality… in two different
ways, one in the legal meaning of that term, the other in the ordinary
meaning of “originality”: there’s nothing new there, it merely

	r e g u r g i t a t e s

from its inputs. (If the companies wouldn’t filter the possible prompts,
it’d be easy to extract near-complete copies of individual “training
data” by the millions, as studies have shown.)

⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠ ⚠

HOWEVER, this does not mean that their output is free from copyright.
Rather, due to the above-mentioned properties (machine transformation
of copyrighted works), the sum of all outputs from such a model is a
derived work from all of its inputs (and for how much this is true for
each individual combination of input and output of course depends on
the prompt, PRNG seed and output in question). This does not, of course,
give you carte blanche to just use *any* of its output… not even small
ones. Citing rules do exist, after all. Especially the academics should
know some…

So.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
  "Using Lynx is like wearing a really good pair of shades: cuts out
   the glare and harmful UV (ultra-vanity), and you feel so-o-o COOL."
                                         -- Henry Nelson, March 1999

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#14232 — Re: Generative systems

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Hi,

disclaimer: I have no problem with the technology itself. I can use the same
knife to cut bread or to hurt somebody. My problem is how 99% of this
technology is being used right now: how it is strengthening monopolies, making
very few people richer at the expense of the public, that the data is in closed
silos, the scraping/stealing of data without consent and the environmental
impact of it all.

Quoting Christian Kastner (2026-02-19 11:08:19)
> I think that as with any other revolutionary technology, we should actively
> contribute and thus help shape it. For example, I was so happy to see this at
> DebConf25 [2].

I do think that it is possible to use this technology responsibly and I do
welcome people working towards models trained on data that was gathered
consentually, can be reproduced, modified, distributed and used ethically and
run on machines owned by the many rather than the very few rich enough to
afford the gigantic datacenters.

> What saddens me the most though is your argument as if this is Capitalism
> just exploiting everyone, because you've clearly not yet experienced how
> transformative LLMs can be to the average person, especially to the
> computer-illiterate who (by no fault of their own) do not possess the skills
> to do anything technical.

I too have yet to experience this myself. I do have an account with OpenAI and
sometimes, when I'm really lost I give ChatGPT a go to check whether maybe it
finally can be an improvement to my life rather than a drain. I have yet to
find a single problem I have which ChatGPT was able to solve for me. Maybe I'm
just too specialized but I doubt it. Maybe my prompts are just bad. Instead, my
time is drained by noobs trying to be smart and making me waste time on pages
of output which a machine generated for them within minutes. The technology is
currently a drain for me personally.

On the other hand, I see my students, the "average person" you may be speaking
of who (by no fault of their own) now do everything via a prompt, be it what I
would solve by "browsing the internet", choosing which pizza place to go to or
do syntax highlighting and indentation for their source code. When I asked the
student who told me about the last bit, they were surprised when I told them
that syntax highlighting and indentation can also be done without an LLM. The
"average person" is currently moving their whole interaction with the world
into the closed silos guarded by few very rich companies and they stop learning
the skills necessary to navigate the world without the aid of a prompt.

So maybe this is transformative to the average person who does not possess the
skills to do anything technical but it is also taking away most of the
motivation for the average person to gain skill in an area and grow because why
would they if it's so comfortable when the prompt gives them all the answers? A
prompt which is driven by very few actors interested in shareholder value on
machines which are mostly not run on renewable energy.

So yes, this makes me very upset at the current state of the world. When I
teach my class I fight an uphill battle against 100+ students who come into my
class thinking that they don't have to learn what I teach them because why
would they if some prompt by OpenAI can give them any answer they want without
them having to put any effort first?

This is my last mail to this thread. Sorry if I wasted anybodies time.

cheers, josch

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#14252 — Re: Generative systems

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On Sun, Feb 22, 2026 at 09:55:40AM +0100, Christian Kastner wrote:
> On 2026-02-19 11:34, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> > (not that I'd trust such a thing, I'm even amused at what a catastrophe
> > the 'working' C compiler is that Claude came up with: https://
> > www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QryFk4RYaM)

[...]

> For another take on Claude's compiler, I can highly recommend this
> recent analysis [1] by Chris Lattner, one of the original LLVM authors.
> It's loaded with valuable insights. I can especially recommend the "What
> the Claude C Compiler Reveals About AI Coding" and "IP Law and
> Proprietary Software Moats" sections.

Thanks for the link, I'll definitely read the post. But, just as a
reminder: Lattner is currently CEO and co-founder of an "AI" company.

Caveat investor.

Cheers
-- 
tomás

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