GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding

GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.

We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.

I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.

AI is evil.

It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.

The association has been made and it is not going away.

“Ai” isn’t inherently evil. It’s just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.

What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they’re 90% bullshit and harmful.

But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don’t really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even “techies” don’t get, so why should a layman.

Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it’s not THAT bad anymore.

I’m just going to quote myself, as I’m satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.

As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.

You are confusing capitalism and ai. AI is just a tool. Capitalist will use any tool it can to hurt labor. This is currently born out by history recent and ancient. The luddites attacked the looms not because they were evil. But because the bourgeoisie were using them to exclude and attack labor.

That is a false equivalence.

The looms, the automated treshers, the tractor, whatever machine designed to a fullfil a task that displaced human labour wasn’t designed with the objective to render humans useless. There were periods of transition when people hurt, needlessly, if I may say so, but new occupations emerged.

This is not the same.

For the first time, we are faced with a technology that feeds off human achievement to be built and next states it can dispense and completely replace what enabled it to be put together to start. While consuming resources we can not afford to waste and returning nothing of value.