Asahi Linux says NO! to AI Slop

It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.

The use of Slop Generators in any contribution to the Asahi Linux project is expressly forbidden.

The Asahi Linux team have cited 3 main points in forbidding LLM use:

• Illegal Output
  • "All of the popular Slop Generators are trained on an incomprehensibly large corpus of text. There is ample evidence across the Web of this training material including copyrighted material, brazenly stolen by the Slop Generator proprietors with impunity"
  • "FOSS projects like Asahi Linux cannot afford costly intellectual property lawsuits in US courts."
• Waste of resources
  • "Slop Generators consume an unfathomable amount of resources we can scarcely afford to waste."
  • "All parts of the Slop Generator supply chain are environmentally intensive. These resources are better used on quite literally anything else."
• LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You)
  • "An emerging trend we have observed is people copying user questions or posts into a Slop Generator, then replying to the post with the generated slop."
  • "If this is you, please realise that others also have access to the same models as you do, and if they wanted an answer from one, they could have asked it themselves."
• It's just matmul (matrix multiplication)

It is very easy to get caught up in the hype that bad actors have built around Slop Generators. The anthropomorphic presentation of Slop Generators as "agents" or "assistants" is a very deliberate attempt to manufacture consent for their integration into workforces at the expense of human interaction. The implication of some higher degree intelligence or sentience is very much deliberate, and it is very much false.

Make no mistake, they cannot think. They cannot reason. They cannot take into account context. They don't "know" things or have a sense of humour or any of the other human-centric qualities bad actors would have you believe of them. Slop Generators are a chain of matrices in a stochastic system. The output of a Slop Generator is nothing more than a statistical calculation, where the next word to be generated is decided by an opaque probabilistic function dependent on previously generated words. This is fundamentally the same mathematics that is used to predict the weather.

A Slop Generator cannot assess the veracity of its claims, nor can it ever tell you that it simply does not know something. Slop Generators are often confidently incorrect as a result, and require brow-beating to admit a mistake. They are therefore highly inappropriate tools in contexts where truth and correctness are of utmost importance, and when the user is not already highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area. This presents a bit of an issue for Slop Generators; if the user is already highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area, then why ask the Slop Generator in the first place?