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.
This is a great question I’ve been meaning to ask myself. Thanks for asking it. Having been vehemently against, I’m a recent convert. For me it was a matter of ethics vs convenience and efficiency. There’s a limit to how fast we can type that an llm isn’t bound by. I first tried running ollama locally, but it didn’t give me the power I wanted, so now I’ve been using Lumo and ollama cloud models for coding. I’ve been impressed with the results and it’s within my ethical standards. (As someone who isn’t a programmer professionally my concerns were primarily based on capitalism. Ollama is “better” but complicated)
I’ve found two different modalities for the way I work both with different results. It comes down to how granular I can make my queries. When I’m writing something I’m more familiar with, like bash, I typically ask for things I already know how to do, but it would be slower to type. Then there’s other cases like writing elisp for emacs. Completely different. Those cases I admittedly vibe code with about the results you’d expect. It’s really given me something to think about.