I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an AI buff. I use it (unpaid) mostly for a search aid or assistance with setting up services in my homeserver (new to homelabbing) when I get stuck, as I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to it due to life obligations.
My question is: Do you feel it is ethical and/or moral to use AI to develop FOSS?
I’m genuinely torn on this issue. Part of me feels it’s counterintuitive, yet the another part of me knows the probability of it going away are slim to none and using it to develop FOSS is a way to “use it against itself”, for lack of a better term.
This is my first post on Lemmy. I’m asking to please keep it cordial. I’m not looking for an elitist lecture. I genuinely want to know the community’s thoughts.
P.S. I’ve toyed with local models, but I don’t have the hardware to make them remotely useful. I’m still learning and tweaking to see what can be achieved on limited hardware.
LLMs can quickly produce outputs that can fool people into thinking a human wrote it, but they cannot write “good” code for the same reason they cannot write good prose, and that’s because they have no understanding of what the code means. The only thing they are rewarded with in training is “are humans able to tell that this thing wasn’t made by a human?” and if the answer is “no” it gets it’s digital training cookie. That’s all LLMs “know”.
So getting back to your question, there is no reason LLMs can’t be used to assist a programmer, or even one day quickly create bespoke software for single use/short term purposes. But a project being FOSS kind of definitionally implies collaboration to ensure reliability which is very difficult when LLMs are used, since again, they don’t have an understanding of what specific code actually means.
IMO anyone ascribing ethics or morals to LLMs (not its use but the technology itself), even in a negative light is grossly exaggerating their capabilities, often unintentionally. LLMs do not have will, they cannot develop a will. They are not curious, they cannot become curious, they cannot understand the world. They do not understand English or Javascript.