John Colagioia

Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023
  • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgtoFree and Open Source Software@beehaw.org•FOSS and Artificial IntelligenceEnglish
    16·
    9 hours ago

    Personally, I think that using LLMs is a terrible idea, especially for Free Software. It creates a reliance on proprietary software[1]. Generated code has uncertain provenance, for the same reason that researchers can provoke LLMs to “auto-complete” famous books, undermining the license. LLMs rewrite instead of fixing, since the latter requires intelligence, so it makes less-maintainable code. And studies show that using models slows work down, rather than speeding it up.

    I’ve only found two arguments in favor: The technology is (allegedly) here to stay. And sure, the studies say that it slows down work, creates bugs in most of its changes, makes everything harder to maintain, alienates the team, and erodes skill, but don’t worry, because I have a system.

    I wouldn’t risk it on any project of mine, and especially not for anything released under a public license where it needs to promise people that they can use the code for any purpose.

    1. Yeah, some claim to have open source licenses, and the OSI is desperately trying to figure out how to approve AI-specific licenses. But since there’s no (useful) way to modify the model without the training data, it’s proprietary. ↩︎