Direct link to the LLM Policy Discussion: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/work_items/187
Example of KDE dev rejecting environmental consideration:
Example of KDE devs not wanting to require LLM use be disclosed.
And all of this is coming right after the debacle with an AI slop project being allowed to give a presentation at Akademy, and the person asking how this was allowed being blocked by KDE:
https://lemmy.nz/post/42029517
as well as the discussion thread bringing up legitimate concerns about AI usage being closed:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/sorry-to-bring-up-a-contentious-topic-kde-ai-llm-policy/46333/164
As someone who genuinely loves KDE, and has even donated to the project multiple times, I sadly have to accept that the majority of KDE have hopped onto the Pro-AI train, and they will not be dissuaded otherwise.
I am locking the thread because I consider this cherry picking comments from KDE maintainers misinformation. Let’s wait and see where they go… The discussion as to include gen AI code, in which ways, how much, etc. is something that many projects (if not all) are undergoing. Let’s be respectful to their open decision processes! This respectfulness needs to be regardless of whether we agree or not with what they do. Once they make a decision, sure, go ahead with flaming commentaries and endorsing alternatives or forks (if they appeared)
You cannot tell from the code necessarily anyway so anti-AI policies are hard to enforce. In the end the developer (or AI wielding human) is responsible for the code quality and its license which is what matters. All this discussion feels just like the usual culture war dividing the community. I’m more concerned about the intentions of people adding fuel to the fire.
Yeah, the people getting upset at this are dumb as rocks.
In the end the developer (or AI wielding human) is responsible for the code quality and its license which is what matters.
They literally may not have any control over the license, that is one of the many big problems people have. Please read the article linked by OP about the copyrightabilty of LLM generated code - https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html. It depends heavily on how they used the LLM, so if there is zero disclosure required the entire project could get into licensing hell down the road.
Yes obviously the code you commit must be yours and you need to make sure it is. That is already a rule, what’s the point of telling people how to work above that?
Due to the nature of LLMs being trained on existing code there is a chance that generated code is lifted verbatim from another piece of software whose license doesn’t permit the copy without attribution. Its a potential legal minefield that I think FOSS project should just steer clear of until the legal landscape surrounding generative AI cools off some.
The stupidity of bandwagoners is on full display in this comment section.
Good. Fuck ludites.
Why?
It’s a actually completely reasonable proposal
It all comes down to one thing - understand the LLM generated code you want to submit, and use the LLM for nothing else than write code, like making other people having to read LLM text. This is a whole lot like the kernel’s LLM policy.
Niko is right, the environmental corcern is not something this policy should go against - what can they do despite ban LLM usage altoguether (and per consequence get LLM generated code submitted anyway), they can’t have a blacklist for models, or force contributors to run them on their local hardware.
what can they do despite ban LLM usage altoguether (and per consequence get LLM generated code submitted anyway), they can’t have a blacklist for models, or force contributors to run them on their local hardware.
But they can? Like OP pointed out, wine forbids contributions from those that have seen Windows source code. How in the world are they supposed to enforce that? Turns out the open source community is pretty good at self enforcing.
I don’t think the average person who wants to contribute to wine has seen windows source code in the first place.
It is much easier to attempt on enforcing something like this that to enforce a full ban on AI. The problem is that AI has a much higher exposure rate than the windows source code.
Nobody said anything about enforcing it. Just put it in the contribution guidelines!! Like for fucks sake, this is like saying you shouldn’t have a law saying you can’t murder people out at sea because it’s impossible to police. The threat of action is half of the reason people don’t do bad things. There’s ZERO REASON to not have it in the guidelines.
I’m with you, but the sad reality is that, unlike Wine devs, AI devs can’t be assumed to act in good faith.
Potential Wine devs who have seen Windows source code will self enforce the rules, because they care about their integrity and the integrity of the project.
AI devs already don’t have an integrity, and they feel smug and superior for actively trying to fool any sort of measure against AI. They also seem to believe AI is the future and isn’t going away, so why bother regulating it if it won’t matter soon.
We need to come up with stricter and more effective ways to regulate and ban AI use, and that’s gonna be the difference between an unusable codebase and a great one in a few years.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t go into the contribution guidelines. If they don’t listen then ok, you remove commits that have claude watermarking. Without that guideline you can’t stop the PRs at all.
Actual proposed policy:
Generally, don’t. What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don’t do it. This includes:
Don’t use an LLM to “organize your thoughts” and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself. Don’t use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself. Don’t use an LLM to generate a reply to someone’s question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.
The one acceptable usage is to write text in your native language and then machine-translate it into English, with no stylistic or tonal changes.
But of course reading is for the LLM, it’s far better to be outraged about ‘hopping on the Pro-AI train’.
That section only relates to descriptions of pull requests, not the AI code itself. They don’t want long rambly AI generated explanations of how the code works, but they are fine if the code itself is AI generated.
Yeah, I forgot to paste part about the code.
World sees AI doing awful things like nudifying children, making nearly every software we use worse, and stealing the world’s knowledge to sell back to us, and generally dislikes AI.
Moronic software devs with massive egos: "WE SHOULD USE AI SEE HOW EASY THIS MAKES MY LIFE NOW I DONT HAVE TO LEARN. "
Also them: “I swear I just use it to augment my work! I’d never take a shortcut and eventually keep taking shortcuts and outsource my thinking! Humans notoriously NEVER take shortcuts!”
Guys wtf are we even doing anymore.
AI is not a thing, it doesn’t act, it doesn’t think. Humans do. Humans nudify children, humans enshitify software, humans steal content
Exactly.
All of the Anti-AI people are actually anti-capitalists, they’re just not finished diagnosing the problem.
AI isn’t building data centers, capitalists are. They’re doing it in such a destructive and rapid manner because they’re trying to leverage their infinite amount of cash into a future monopoly. If it wasn’t AI it would have been some other product.
Fighting the product and ignoring the actual human beings who are making these destructive decisions is only adding to the smoke screen that shifts blame away from names like Huang, Altman, and Musk.
I think you can be anticapitalist and also anti-AI. I’m certainly both
I think you can be anticapitalist and also anti-AI. I’m certainly both
Yes, the venn is basically a circle.
All of the ‘bad things AI is doing’ are bad things that capitalists are doing.
Nobody is actually angry at AI for solving age old mathematical problems, folding proteins or locating cancers. It’s not the technology that people care about.
People are angry at rapacious capitalism and are misdirecting it at the technology and not the rapacious capitalists. Anti-AI is just Anti-Capitalism for new leftists.
Same here! I don’t care who is responsible for it, no matter where on the political spectrum the creators are, I’m still not supporting it.
You sound like “Guns don’t kill people! Robbers do!”
So I’m going to ask you, would you give a gun to a child? Would you? Just answer that
Except AI won’t kill you
What in the bullshit bad faith non sequitor is this.
it doesn’t act,
I don’t disagree with anything else you are saying or the sentiment, but with the rise of “AI Agents” it is becoming more common that the AI actually does something. It seems like there is a new story every few days about an agent deleting an entire database or buying plane tickets or sending an e-mail to the FBI. Unfortunately, we have people giving it more and more permissions and ability to “just act” and it is only getting worse.
Most of those ‘news’ stories are sensationalized to the point of fiction.
And it wrecks the environment, and it stunts the user’s intelligence without actually being able to do anything truly original or novel, and it makes worse, buggier, less secure, less maintainable software. The list goes on and on
Do we have a list of desktops that ban AI?
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#desktop-environments
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#window-managers
tl;dr: Lumina, Lumina NG, and GNOME (not mentioned) are good choices of DE; bspwm, River, Sway, and Openbox are good choices of WM. The two options in bold have anti-AI policies, while the rest are simply untainted. Openbox is safer than the rest, as it has been feature-complete since 2010, and therefore only gets occasional patches.
Niri should join that list since this recent commit: https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/commit/7256ccf6274a1f953c6987ade34ea1c0e4944c27
Good to see that. I was sceptical because literally ~2 days ago I saw a LLM gen’d PR not be outright rejected and the lead dev requested deletion unnecessary comments which meant they were open to the merge. Seeing how the change came yesterday makes far more sense.
E: Seems like 1 hour (E2: ago*) they even commented on the PR about the new policy: https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/pull/3246#issuecomment-5755531477
BSD.
Linux has reasonable use of AI permitted.
This list contains the only known DE’s that openly reject AI. Basically just a couple window managers.
Pretty much every major full blown DE accepts or uses AI. Gnome and Cinnamon have no official stances
Yeah, but GNOME developers mostly dislike AI, so the project could be considered to be at a lower risk of contamination.
It definitely seems like one of the better options for the full fledged DE’s.
On a related note, while looking through that new list, it lists Sway as a non-AI alternative, but as of a couple weeks ago, this doesn’t looks promising: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/9272
Conveniently utilizing the hardships that Kenyans face or random ethical concerns about climate change as your motivating factor while being beneficiaries of Françafrique and modern famines in Africa is not a serious position, it’s borderline racist.
Lmao i guess we’re racist now for having ethical concerns.
Really unfortunate, sway was my favourite wm, but even without ai slop, I’m not just gonna keep using it after they call me racist.
That doesn’t look great, but the code still seems clean: https://slopscan.ava.pet/repo/https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fswaywm%2Fsway/master
Perhaps for now. Personally I’d be hesitant to invest in learning Sway’s keyboard shortcuts and workflow if they’re going to be pro-AI long term.
In my view having a healthy discussion about this is a good thing. People will always have different views in many things, and it is natural that a common ground is achieved by having a honest debate about a given subject.
With the above in mind, hardline 100% pro or 100% con points of view are usually wrong and counterproductive, and even framing the discussion that way is harmful. I hope the discussion leads to a good and reasonable outcome.
I view AI as a pure evil platform that is terrible for the environment and trained on stolen data. IMO there is no discussion to be had, it should be banned period.
To me, it’s like discussing how much domestic abuse is allowed in a relationship. I say zero tolerance where someone else could say they think it should be fully allowed, and then a middle person thinks that we should be trying to find a common ground.
To me, it’s like discussing how much domestic abuse is allowed in a relationship.
But it is not. And a frank discussion about the subject to define what is acceptable and what is not, is key to a healthy community and project. Hardline stand on each end just make that discussion impossible, on purpose.
But to me, it is. I don’t try to find middle ground with Nazis, rapists, abusers, fraudsters, literers, etc… I want AI to burn. Cease to exist. I don’t want a healthy community and project. That’s the only discussion I care to have.
The difference is that every form of domestic abuse is awful and should face zero tolerance, whereas with “AI tools” there is still nuance in what that phrase means.
Even if we talk specifically about generative AI, there are models trained on only licensed data, and it’s possible to train and run models locally for the specific tasks that it is good for. The end of the day, it is an algorithm and there are some tasks that it is better at doing.
The point the other user is making is that a contribution policy should take those factors into account.
IMO a more effective principled stance would be to ban the use of specific “AI” tools that are proven to be abusive.
there are models trained on only licensed data, and it’s possible to train and run models locally for the specific tasks that it is good for
No one is doing this for programming. People love to make this argument then then turn around and use claude or something
I switched to Niri a few months ago as an experiment but now I guess I will not go back to KDE anytime soon
the policy in question:
The golden rule for LLM usage in KDE is Don’t be lazy:
-
Don’t try to use a tool to replace your own judgment, interpersonal communication, or learning process.
-
Don’t take unsustainable shortcuts.
-
Don’t avoid growing as a person.
The result will be poor-quality work that eventually becomes someone else’s problem.
Nobody in KDE should know if you use an LLM — not because you’re concealing it, but because your usage of it produces output indistinguishable from what you could produce yourself. Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed.
Using an LLM to generate contributions
KDE follows a “human in the loop” principle: you must be making decisions and adjustments beyond mere prompting. The output must express your unique humanity in some way.
- Don’t be a “meat proxy”. For example:
- Don’t submit throwaway LLM-created changes as a “first draft or proof-of-concept for maintainers to improve”.
- Don’t submit “vibe-coded” changes you don’t understand and couldn’t make yourself.
- Don’t disclose LLM usage as a way of trying to excuse the potential errors or poor quality of a contribution that you haven’t put much effort into.
- Don’t add “Assisted-by: [some LLM]” tags to your commits; it’s just free advertising for the LLM’s provider.
(emphasis original, except for the fourth bullet point)
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Don’t go saying “well chatgpt said it”, no, you are responsible for it.
One small problem: People are now also using AI to generate summaries of their vibe coded garbage, to push them through checks.
Using an LLM to generate text
Generally, don’t. What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don’t do it. This includes:
- Don’t use an LLM to “organize your thoughts” and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself.
- Don’t use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself.
- Don’t use an LLM to generate a reply to someone’s question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.
emphasis mine
This isn’t a bad policy, but outright ignoring ethical and environmental concerns doesn’t seem very wise either. That should still be discussed, even if this becomes the final version of the policy.
This seems fine
This seems fine to me, it’s all they can really do since banning AI entirely just isn’t possible; someone could use it and submit very high quality code and no one would know AI was involved.
And if its very high quality, does it matter?
There are more concerns beyond the quality of the code itself, such as the ones I listed here
“You are responsible for the code you submit, regardless of tools used.”
Literally the same stance Linus had on Linux. I’m okay with it as long as it’s enforced.
Yes, that’s fine. And it’s also easy to enforce - just treat any code as if it’s written by a human (except obviously machine generated code like hardware descriptions etc).
Being against AI and LLMs is all fine and dandy, but it kinda takes ridiculous shape now.
However, I would prefer if open source tools would only allow the usage of open weight models and self-hosted systems. But then again, that’s my idealism talking.
I hate vibe coding, detest it, i’m tired of it. it wastes time and resources. That being said I use AI for debugging and as a glorified rubber duck. I don’t let it write ANYTHING but I will allow it to review code and make suggestions. Generally, I’d say 8 times out of 10 the suggestions are garbage BUT it will lead me down the right path. it’s a rubber duck that can talk back. So in that regards it has improved my build times, it has sped me up without actually touching the code itself.
THAT’s what AI/LLMs SHOULD be used for. an assistant that doesn’t directly interact with the project. a consultant to your code if you will.
unfortunately many people can’t make that separation and they sit on both sides of the fence.
LLMs are great for rubberducking and diagnosis, forensics, and the like.
We all know the enforcement won’t match the usage, but I’m still ok with the decision.
i like how people exaggerated this into “oh no, KDE is s|op now”. I totally get the hate for greedy and overhyping ai corpos, but if this policy is a sign of slop, you a) most probably never coded anything in your life b) unaware that before ai-slop there was natural, human-produced™ slop and dumb stackoverflow copypasta that barely even worked.
It’s that humans cannot be trusted to not take shortcuts and AI has proven time and time again to be a literal gambling machine that uses persuasive writing techniques to convince you of things you wouldn’t otherwise think.
KDE is also fighting transparency which is terrible.
It’s not going to be shocking when KDE starts performing worse. If more than one person works on a project and you’re just hoping people use things responsibly, you’re dreaming.
Humans optimize everything and AI pretends to be the greatest optimization tool of all time while it spits spaghetti code it’s authors understand less of over time while it tells them "great idea! I’ll get to work right away!
you couldn’t trust humans to not take shortcuts long before the advent of ai. That’s the point of my previous comment.
KDE’s stance is literally “as long as the code is of sufficient quality and you’re able to take the responsibility over it, we don’t care which tools you were using along the way”. Policing people over what they’re (not) allowed to use never yielded positive results.
If anything, such policy allows less slop to slip through, than in any project with anti-ai policy, simply because the maintainers would be aware of the possibility, and thus would have to pay closer attention to the PR quality.
Finally, it’s an open source project. Even if anything sloppy slips past the eyes of maintainers, rather sooner than later it would be noticed by the community and fixed.
[…] AI pretends to be the greatest optimization tool of all time […]
Which is obvious to you, me, and trust me when i say that it’s obvious to anybody who ever tried using ai for even the most minor coding tasks harder than webdev.
-
guess its time to move my desktop off of kde.
this is a pretty big change for me because it has been my default desktop enviroment since i first got into linux
Well, fuck.
Any viable alternatives, or should I switch to BSD? (Gnome obviously doesn’t count, it’s designed for tablets, not desktops).
GNOME is great if you use Dash to Panel.
Check out the options listed here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/24475952
If you want to get away from LLM assisted code your best bet is NetBSD, with an older version of an X11 DE , using an older version of Firefox with JavaScript turned off.
If you do this you are basicly fully avoiding LLM assisted code. Be sure to check every thing you install though. Or use only software versions from before 2023.
BSD has a libertarian energy to its culture, so I suspect they will be vibing a lot too.
AFAIK NetBSD is explicitly rejecting AI contributions.
That and OpenBSD’s Theo de Raadt is rejecting LLM code based on copyright arguments (not “respect author” but rather “we get sued” kind of point), here’s an example (click “next in thread” a bunch of times if you want).
Though back in 2001 he claimed the songs on the CDs were “as free as everything else” (no), but like meh.
So many people say they reject AI, but then how can you even use desktop Linux?
The kernel & the popular browsers have an increasing number of AI contributions, there is no escaping this.
I’m personally trying to switch to NetBSD. But, it’s not going well. My laptop can’t right-click in X under NetBSD, e.g.
A lot of the ecosystems I used to enjoy and support, I simply can’t anymore. Firefox, Linux, GHC, Debian, KDE, etc., etc. It’s a distressing time for me.
Can relate, everything I used to think of as a safe haven, a return to 90’s style computing, is seemingly being corrupted, and the few remaining options we have require a rather big sacrifice in usability.
Modern society is built on destruction and cruelty. Doesn’t mean I can advice somebody to give up living in society and sound smart.
To suggest that “compromising on ideals for practicality” is the same as “roll-over and accept it” is dishonest and only done by people who want to win the argument by attrition so they get what they want.
As it is impossible to completely avoid AI use with Linux, I must content myself with only minimization instead of complete elimination, as I won’t let the pursuit of perfection mean I just give up entirely. Any reduction is still meaningful, just as it’s still worthwhile to minimize fossil fuel usage and meat consumption as much as is reasonably possible.
This is all completely out of your control. You cannot tell people how to work in opensource and projects are completely unable to control if someone uses AI (or which one) to perform tasks, since it is not visible in the result. The easiest thing for you to do, if you don’t want to take part in it, is to put down your phone and go outside.
…No it isn’t? I can choose what software I use, there are projects making efforts to avoid AI as much as is possible, and most contributors tend to follow guidelines, so having no-AI rules, while not 100% effective at avoiding AI code, will still drastically reduce what gets in, which is all I’m aiming for, and which is absolutely achievable.
I’ve noticed that virtually all Pro-AI people are constantly pushing this idea that resistance is futile, and that we all just have to accept AI into all aspects of our lives, almost like a cult. I even saw some if that rhetoric in the KDE proposal this thread is about.
You can drink the AI koolaid as much as you want, but you’re not going to stop me from trying to limit it in my life wherever possible, and I’ll continue to advocate for others to abstain for a multitude of reasoned arguments as well.
I do kinda get Niccolo’s point that a contribution policy is not the place to decide environmental concerns even though it feels contradictory at first glance. He’s generally very critical and nuanced when it comes to LLMs so I wouldn’t call him “pro-AI”. Just watch his YouTube content.
Be quiet, we’re trying to be mad about AI.
While we’re at it, why hasn’t KDE condemned Hamas or taken a stand on the proliferation of weapons in space?
I can’t support a DE which hasn’t distanced itself from Ed Sheeran. Hopefully someone will fork KDE into a more Ed Sheeran-less experience.
I want to be angry god damn it, why is there not more things to be angry about on the topic of KDE!!!
I don’t really see why environmental policy shouldn’t be mentioned in the contribution policy. If it’s there as the justification for why a part of the policy exists and it is accurate about what the environmental impacts actually are, it seems to fit in fine within the policy? Not wanting the point there doesn’t make KDE pro-AI (since they might just want to mention it elsewhere), but it is valid criticism if they don’t acknowledge it anywhere.
However I do feel that the other points in the post are weaker. KDE’s stance is in line with what the SFC recommends when it comes to AI in FOSS, specifically around contributions. I came across the SFC recommendations a while back and it’s held up well in similar discussions so far: https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html
Devs rejecting any notion of transparency by disclosing AI usage in code submissions
I don’t think they rejected the transparency part? I agree that transparency is necessary. Rather their reply is telling the commenter to not shun people. Both of those points are reflected in the SFC recommendations (point 5 on disclosure and point 3 on shunning)
And all of this is coming right after the debacle with an AI slop project being allowed to give a presentation at Akademy, and the person asking how this was allowed being blocked by KDE
I get the feeling that KDE does not curate much of anything, for better or for worse. There is a good bit of content in the KDE ecosystem that is outdated or straight up shovelware.
On top of that, Akademy is a conference that is intended for discussion, rather than a presentation about KDE.
Akademy features a 2-day conference with presentations on the latest KDE developments, followed by 4 days of workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) and coding sessions. It is an opportunity to meet key KDE contributors, learn about the latest features and enjoy the great atmosphere. You will meet developers, artists, translators, upstream and downstream maintainers, users, and free and open software industry leaders from all over the world
It wouldn’t work well if they had to curate every presentation at such an event. It is indeed deceitful to imply that the presenter is going to change the direction of KDE if in reality they rarely contribute and have little say in the direction of KDE. Also IMO it’s good that they let that guy participate in the conversation because it let everyone else raise points about why the idea is bad.
The contribution policy is the only place where anything meaningful can be done, as that is ultimately what will influence developers trying to contribute. Putting environmental concerns anywhere else is, IMHO, just virtue signalling.
I personally consider advocating for non-disclosure of AI use to be Pro-AI. Advocating for disclosure but still allowing it would be neutral.
Environmental concerns should be a topic that is dealt by politics.
The state dictates what is allowed and what is forbidden for any legal entity.
For example: It would be meaningless for a local kebab shop to debate whether they should use cucumbers with pesticides or without to protect the bees. If the law would say, all pesticides are forbidden, bee deaths due to pesticides would be gone. Ofc such a decision would have impact on food prices etc. so if asingle kebab shop would do it, they’d just become uncompetitive compared to the rest while making no change in bee deaths. Kind of a virtue signaling shot in the foot.
Same here, the environmental impact is not something that KDE can meaningfully influence with their decision.
