The panel was working through Debian's decision to permit AI-assisted contributions, and a co-host had just said the vote left him feeling defeated. Morrison turns the complaint back on the show: the models were trained on the millions of lines of open source code they spent decades urging people to publish. He lands it as a joke at a colleague's expense and then calls it depressing himself.
With the decision to say you as a contributor are responsible and you can't say, oh, well, the AI did it. So it's not my responsibility. Are they including copyright in that? So you as a contributor are responsible?
I don't think anyone knows. We are in uncharted waters when it comes to the copyright of this stuff. So who knows what's going to become of it? I mean, probably it'll all be fine, but maybe not. And that's where I expected Debian to fall on it. I mean, this thing has completely just broken me, obviously, because I thought that Debian would stand up to it and they just haven't. And now I just feel completely defeated. If even fucking Debian is going to allow slop, then what hope is there for anything? And so I feel like if I look at a project and there are AI contributions to it, it used to be that, right, fuck it, that's going on the shit list. But between Debian, the kernel, everything, it's fucking everywhere. And so what can I do? I can still moan about it, but I can't just not use any software that's got AI code in it, can I? That's just not realistic now.
I had a horrifying thought that, in fact, maybe all of this kind of open source advocacy we've been doing for decades, we've actually become part of the problem. If it wasn't for the readily available millions and millions of lines of open source code, we wouldn't have LLMs in the first place. So in fact, it's all your fault, Joe.
Yeah, it is. It's completely my fault.
Such a depressing take.
Oh, God. I think in Debian's case, as in lots of very popular open source projects, there is a choice between drown under the never-ending sea of pull requests and bug fixes and comments and not even bug fixes, but bugs being logged. I think that the answer for these projects is to fight fire with fire and leverage AI to help them stay on top of the workload. I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up. And the people on the project would just go, oh, fuck this, and they would give up. So I think that this is an investment in the future of Debian existing, whether you like it or not. Well,