Gentoo Linux bans AI code: Moral and legal concerns

On 14 April, the seven-member Gentoo Council decided that no more AI-generated or AI-supported code should flow into the Linux distribution. The council cites three main reasons for this: Copyright issues, quality concerns and ethical issues.

In his initial proposal, developer Michal Górny explains these points in more detail:

1. Copyrights: the situation is unclear, all LLMs are trained with copyrighted material and there is a high probability that code will be created that Gentoo cannot legally use. And: "all the fancy 'AI' companies don't give a damn about copyright infringement".
2. Quality: If you know your way around, LLMs can be a good help, but Górny doesn't trust all contributors to do this. "LLMs are really good at producing plausible-looking nonsense."
3. Ethical concerns: AI causes a huge waste of energy, leads to the dismissal and exploitation of IT workers, produces spam and fraud and "drives the enslavement of the internet."

After several rounds of discussion, the Council passed the resolution:

"It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case have been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns."

In detail, this means:

"It is expressly forbidden to contribute any content to Gentoo that was created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing AI tools. This decision may be revised should such a tool exist that does not pose copyright, ethical or quality concerns."

Pros and cons of quality

Quality concerns in particular have been discussed more frequently recently. In the Gentoo forum, however, there are also critical voices regarding the decision. One participant writes that he understands the quality concerns when people blindly use what the AI spits out, "just like some people copy and paste from StackOverflow without understanding what they are copying. Should StackOverflow be banned?" Another asks what about code control by AI: "undiscovered errors, bugs or at worst security vulnerabilities?"

Another quotes Linus Thorvald: "Automation has always helped people write code. There's nothing new about it at all."

The Gentoo decision obviously leaves many questions unanswered. This also seems to be clear to the Council, as Górny immediately set up a wiki page for further clarification. In an initial clarification, it states that software that generates AI itself is not affected by the decision, nor is upstream code that was developed with AI assistance.

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