SFC Announces Aspirational Statement on LLM-backed generative AI for Programming - Software Freedom Conservancy

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2024-10-25 20:30:07

In 2022, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) convened a committee in the wake of Microsoft's GitHub Copilot announcement, to meet and begin considering the complex questions that arise from the use of large language models (LLMs) in generative AI systems that seek to assist software developers.

Today, we announce a joint statement by this committee, entitled Machine-Learning-Assisted Programming that Respects User Freedom.

Everyone on our committee has watched as interest in this issue has grown in the FOSS community. While the Committee was initially convened to consider how copyleft related to these systems, our focus changed as we considered the complex issues. With the unending influx of models, products, and projects in this area, we began to see a potential dystopia: no systems available today are reproducible by the public, and all of them seem to disrespect user rights and freedoms in some manner. Rather than despair, we turned our minds to what FOSS does best: imagining the ideal if corporate interests were not the primary force defining society's relationship with software.

In the past, the FOSS community has responded to new challenges with a race-to-the-bottom document that defines the bare minimum of user rights and freedoms that the community of activists will accept. For-profit companies hope to legitimately claim whatever they produce is “FOSS enough”. As such, we have avoided any process that effectively auto-endorses the problematic practices of companies whose proprietary products are already widely deployed . No system, particularly a proprietary one, should ever be "too big to fail".