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Comment by flammafex | Hacker News Reader

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Everyone is starting to make AI a moral question one way or another. So your moral view is progress must march on unimpeded by private actors?

I find that pretty original. I think progress will march largely unimpeded. I would be wary of unhinged government intervention, but I wouldn’t begrudge private actors for not getting on with the ticket.

To complete your analogy: To this day there are humans who have never in their life exceeded 300km/h outside of an airplane. Mostly people in places that had become used to driving. Used to subpar travel times, safety, efficiency and cost. In hindsight, those that saw the horses swapped for electric ones with the carriages mostly unchanged should have been more protective in their transport planning. Could have saved us from the 110 year detour that scarred almost all urban centers.

I think you'll find the luddites to be a more informative historical analogy. A new tool arrives in an industry staffed by craftsmen, providing capital a lever to raise profits at the expense of quality. Is it surprising that worker co-ops would choose not to pull that lever?

Why do you believe the quality will go down?

The mistake here with both the Luddites and this is to mistake the tool for the actual problem (depending on where you sit), which is mechanization and automation and ultimately capitalism itself.

Opposing the machine does/did nothing.

Political organizing around unions, state regulations of the labour market, agitational political parties did (and can again).

Political organizing around unions, state regulations of the labour market, and agitational political parties did nothing to prevent the severe decline of clothing quality that was the Luddites were advocating against. But of course, propaganda has very successfully reduced their entire platform to "worker's pay" alone, which is an even easier line to feed to people that over the decades have become accustomed to literal slop as apparel. And I mean that very literally - clothes that straight-up lose their structural integrity after a handful of laundry cycles.

Of course, there's definitely absolutely nothing about the state of the garment industry that's applicable to the current discussions about AI re: software quality and worker compensation. It's not as if this industry has not already seen its fair share of quality going to the dogs with only a small handful of people still knowing and caring enough to call it out while most others cheer for the Productivity™.

How about picking software based on how well it works?

How about trusting the review process, and not attempting to regulate the tools used to produce code. We already accept code from IDE autocompletion, StackOverflow, templates, etc. The real control point is review, testing, and license verification.

Then we wouldn't get to virtue signal about the state of the software industry getting rid of all these starving artists.

Posted from my software made with AI assistance.

One's legitimate tool is the other's slop machine

NetBSD has a very reasonable stance:

  If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

  Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

No, it is not reasonable to presume code generated by any large language model is "tainted code." What does that even mean? It sounds like a Weird Al parody of the song "Tainted Love."

“Taint” has been a term of art in Open Source for decades. That you don’t know this reveals your ignorance, not any sort of cleverness.

LLMs regurgitate their training data. If they’re generating code, they’re not modeling the syntax of a language to solve a problem, they’re reproducing code they ingested, code that is covered by copyright. Just regurgitating that code via an LLM rather than directly from your editor’s clipboard does not somehow remove that copyright.

It’s clear you think you should be allowed to use LLMs to do whatever you want. Fortunately there are smarter people than you out there who recognize that there are situations where their use is not advised.

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