so many apps on F-Droid are clearly vibe coded. I literally just downloaded a nice looking launcher, tried it out, checked the source code and it openly said it was a project in vibe coding. Shame as it looked like a nice concept but i can't trust it.

I used to be able to trust that f-droid apps were ugly, buggy, functional, and made with integrity and care. The toothpaste is clearly out of the tube now but it's a shame what we have lost.

As long as the debate is kept civil.

I think it has already become impossible to try to enforce a complete ban on ai and trying to do so would ultimately fail while causing carnage to the community.

Oh crud… Lately I've talked to the F-Droid account on the Fediverse about “AI” anti-feature. And I was shut down due to increased workload.

…now I wonder how EU rules about labeling degenAI content will affect them and Debian.

Edit: there are hints that the Debian vote was staged: hachyderm.io/@dalias/117179333327047930

I wonder how much it differ from "I do not want apps written in language A" mantra.

There were people writing shitty software. There are, and there will be.

Never mind which language they speak, which they use to write an app and how much of that app will come from AI/LLM.

The thing is: no one is forcing to use AI or AI assisted apps.

@tobifant My read is that you are still framing things in terms of usefulness; where for many the usefulness of the output is not a determining factor, like @neil said. Put another way, you could have LLM code that is provably better (whatever that means) than the human equivalent and still not want to interact with it (on climate, stolen training data, vendor lock-in, or some other arguments).

"Is it useful" is not enough of a bar for many.

I find the Gentoo rules to be of great inspiration.

"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 be made for such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns."

wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

I if people don’t want AI generated code they should have that choice. The problem is it’s impossible to police unless someone submits an obvious slop PR.

Short of using AI to try to detect AI code and hoping it has 100% despite the ethical implications l, I’m not sure how you’d do it.

the argument "we should follow debian's example" made me so fucking furious.

I sincerly hope f-droid choose a no-AI policy.

@Neil Brown I do not think, that it is the purpose of an app repository/store, to control wether an in part or fully "vibe coded" app should be legal or not.

Srsly.... that decision is to be made by the user ..... NOT maintainers or appstores..

Feels to me that if your arguments can also be used to justify slavery, you need to consider your position more carefully.

Keep on doing the good work. 💜

> > It is not for F-Droid to determine what F-Droid hosts

I am bit surprised by this argument and its ingenuity.

Of course EVERY project which is brokering things or hosting things can and must determine what it hosts. For example (taken from a different domain) hosting a rendering of mad old uncle Adolf's "Mein Kampf" will decidedly get a project into trouble in some jurisdictions, so there has to be a determination of the unavoidable limitations one wants to accept and which not. Either not offering the service everywhere or not hosting everything.

Furthermore F-Droid takes a stand on undesired types of content already with the section "Features you might not like".

@kbm0
> Although purism is well meant

I don't think its about purism. I hope you have followed the (negative) impact of AI on FOSS community and projects recently, but I FEAR that LLM is directly going to smother projects faster than it's providing a boost to anything.

@kbm0 what is the argument supposed to be? "we can't control everything so we can't control anything"? systems can be imperfect without wholeheartedly embracing their imperfections. that's just life. we do what we can. but i suppose not everyone thinks of it that way.

there are already dozens of projects with anti-ai policies...hopefully it won't "kill FLOSS". here's some: codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index

if minimum viable non-slop alternatives to given libraries exist, they ought to be preferred; if a library is known to be slop in advance, it would be better not to use it if possible. i don't see the need to throw up our hands and give up because of dependencies

I've added a comment to that ticket also expressing my disapproval, for whatever that's worth.

Thank you for your work on this and for being a sensible voice amongst all the AI boosters.

You know what? You're right.

@hackbyte, I'm sorry, you made a valid point and I misinterpreted it.

I think @fdroidorg allowing #AIslop will be it's end, because why should anyone defend it against #Google?

• Just to @keepandroidopen ??

EXACTLY!

• But thoise caught will get their foreseeable consequences…

i note from the inclusion policy:

"The implementation of proprietary tracking or advertising libraries and analytics tools such as Google Play Services and Firebase and Crashlytics and proprietary ad/tracking SDKs are strictly forbidden in all applications. Upstream developers must implement either a FLOSS alternative or a build flavour that does not require these dependencies"

i would consider #ai watermarking which is essentially going to be mandatory in Europe to count as this kind of proprietary tracking

@glitzersachen @kbm0 its already smothered and fragmented FOSS. Asking one of these services to create you a "clean room" version of a GPL library was touted as a selling point a year or more ago.

just as AI search cuts off web sources from google users, AI code generation cuts off users from the original libraries.

I think it's meant to be a word against overly broad anti-AI policies, i.e. a "just because the system libraries were slopped doesn't mean that your app that uses them is".

Which, to be frank, I don't think that's ever actually been a suggestion by anyone in the history of all of this, and seems unhelpful at best, but I can at least see where it's coming from.