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.


Two reasons, three if you include the footnote that already answers the reductive “substitutable service” idea. Thirty-plus years ago, Free Software developers often used proprietary compilers. That was reliance on proprietary products. This is relying on proprietary tools to generate code, unless we want to pretend that people are out there running A/B tests between hand-written and generated code. The tools also generate unmaintainable code while making the developers less capable, making the tools more necessary as teams use them, which also sounds like reliance.