A proposal to make KDE an “AI-native” desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.*
Last weekend was KDE’s annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement.
In the days since, a debate over proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions descended into bans and a deleted thread. An outside campaign called for KDE to prohibit AI altogether, a GNOME developer proposed a similar policy for that project, and KDE developer Nate Graham apologized for his role in the uproar.
The Akademy talk was titled “A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” and the slide deck [PDF] is now available. It ends by saying: “The question is not whether AI. It is how. You choose how much AI – and which.”
It seems almost calculated to provoke an argument rather than invite discussion. We do not know if the authors intended this – we attempted to contact both of them, but they have not yet responded.
Graham opened a discussion on Invent, KDE’s GitLab instance, about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions. Although we are not a member, we watched this with some interest over the weekend. It rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread.
There is an archive of the discussion, but we warn you, it contains some highly offensive language, albeit censored by the member who quoted another member’s tweets on X. As events unfolded, the participant who drew attention to the posts was banned first. The author of the offensive material was banned later after their identity was verified.
The discussion is gone, but the argument continues.
One response was an outside initiative called KDE for People, which called on the KDE project to adopt a No-AI policy. Around 250 people signed it before its organizers closed it to further signatures.
GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure.
This mentions the recent ballot on AI usage in Debian. We reported on the developer referendum about a month ago, noting that the broad spread of anti-AI options in the ballot was likely to split the vote. (This likelihood was dismissed in the comments.) Well, as The Register’s Asia-Pacific desk reported a few days later, Debian did not ban AI contributions.
Graham subsequently explained his involvement in a post titled KDE and AI, and you, and me. He opens by saying: “So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that.”
He notes that the Akademy talk met “what I’m told was a fairly chilly reception” and that “the next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception.”
Every couple of years, the KDE project sets three goals for the next two years. Earlier this week, after Akademy, it chose its latest three: you can see them in the last column of the goal-setting Kanban board. The ones chosen are:
KDE for Enterprise and Deployments (Issue #5)
Better documentation (Issue #2)
Next Generation Styling for KDE (Issue #3)
We see no mention of AI in there. In context, that may come as a relief to parts of the community.
Bootnote
*A tip of the black Borsalino to the late great Terry Pratchett, for two different “house on fire” references we combined. ®
I enjoyed KDE without AI. Why do we gotta ruin nice things?
Fun fact: KDE blocks you on Mastodon if you kindly tell them you’re disappointed in their actions.
Source: https://tech.lgbt/@ElectroLisa/117326339165624644
Same here. When the community found out about the inclusion of that weird akademy talk they tried to deflect that everything is up to discussion. I pointed out that they closed the thread that was trying to do that and got blocked shortly after. This was before they created that AI ticket.
Nicco explained why that person was banned before the fascist guy was. I think they should be unbanned quickly, so that is a big issue.
But also, KDE basically allows any LLM use that is not traceable, which makes sense because everything else is unachievable. It is a compromise but they have a practical stance.
Nicco says a lot of things, especially when it comes to defending fascists. That wasn’t even the first time.
Also, the idea that you can’t ban something just because a few people will get away with it is false. Literally all rules work that way. The average slop coder isn’t subtle about it and they will get banned if they try to pass of their extrusions as their own work. Contributors who stick around usually do because they care about that community. These contributors will then also respect that communities rules and values.
At times I’m starting to feel like there’s some sort of AI-derangement syndrome starting to take a hold of people. Some dude proposed a AI-dekstop thing (as a joke or a provocation, I feel like), everyone reacted to that proposal with a “what? lol, no.” then some media reports “KDE wants to turn into a AI-desktop!”, someone posts that to Lemmy (not this thread, a earlier one from a few days ago) and people lose their fucking minds, start talking about dropping KDE, going to FreeBSD and other silliness. Then for a few days these articles keep dropping, people keep getting upset.
Meanwhile, what is the official KDE stance? Seems to be pretty reasonable to me. I don’t know if the media needs to be less clickbaity and not pick up any stupid proposal by a random person, or should the people reading the media do a little it of more digging than just reacting to the headline. Probably a bit of both. But this whole thing is getting seriously silly. At this point you cant really discuss AI in any meaningful manner, at least not on Lemmy, because of the knee jerk reactions and extreme opinions.
Whats even more sad is that I feel like I need to add a disclaimer that I am not pro-AI, even though I don’t think I voiced an opinion on it, in the main part of my stupid rant. I feel like I need to add it, because if I don’t some people will just ignore what I’m saying and start going on at me about how AI bad and I should feel bad. Or something.
Anyway, if you read all that, I’m sorry to have wasted your time.
The Linux Experiment - No, KDE isn’t turning into an AI desktop: https://youtu.be/Pkgvc7jwxwU
The way people on Lemmy just assume and act on those assumptions is embarrassing.
Good thing is that it leads me to using social media less because this people are insufferable.
Haha, thats a positive way of looking at it.
Now that you mentioned it, I think I’ve also started using social media less and less because of the extreme extremism that is going about. If you have a opinion that is not in one extreme or the other, you’ll get a bollocking from all sides.
Luckily I found a nice IRC network with nice people who are able to discuss things. Been spending my days there instead of doomscrolling Lemmy or reddit.
Fuck AI. Keep AI out of Linux. Keep AI out of KDE. Keep AI out of Debian. Keep AI out of the kernel.
It ends by saying: "The question is not whether AI. It is how.
To quote Louis Rossman: this is rapist mentality.
These chuds want to force AI down everyone’s throats.
“You choose how much AI – and which.”
How about fucking none asshole?
Ew. It’s also the way aging, time, seasons, entropy work. Why jump directly to rape?
Because there’s a horrifying lack of understanding of the idea of consent. I’m tired of the AI evangelists constantly pushing it onto people, ignoring their protests.
It’s being realistic. Work done with or without AI isn’t distinguishable. You can be 100% against something, but if you cannot even recognise it when it’s in front of you, how are you going to ban it?
No one is forcing anything. There’s nobody going around saying “you must use AI”. People are using it willingly and happily. Banning its use in a project will just lead to people using it surreptitiously.
Work done with or without AI isn’t distinguishable.
It most certainly is distinguishable. The problem is that you need expertise in the related field to see a good chunk of the signs. For example, AI often gives dangerous medical advice that sounds reasonable to those without a background in medicine. Presenting incorrect information in an authoritative manner does not help people. It creates mistrust for those who actually know the answer.
The same is true of writing code. AI will give you code that looks good to those who couldn’t write it themselves. That’s not the same thing as writing good code. It’s true that you can painstakingly create guardrails to mitigate many of the issues caused by AI generated code, but in order to do that effectively you need to know both what a good output should look like and how the AI you’re using is likely to fuck that up. To me that sounds like writing code with extra steps.
Maybe there’s still value to be had in that outcome but it’s definitely not as straightforward as you’re making it out to be.
Sure, you’re talking about the imbeciles using AI, but I dare you to tell the difference between AI and corporate talk. AI can make amazing marketing press releases because the human written ones didn’t make any sense anyway. They’re the same bullshit.
And yes, code written by AI that is simply prompted by a junior or a person who know what they’re talking about, is going to be shit. A vibe coded project will show it’s colors. But you’re ignoring (or unaware) the output that ends up in an expert’s projects. You might think you can recognise it, but I can tell you, you won’t. And if you don’t want to believe me, try it yourself.
I worked with a dude who used to finish his tasks pretty quickly and I just thought he was a good programmer. It finally dawned on me that he was using AI, because his level of the programming language wasn’t that high but the code constructs he was using were advanced and sometimes unnecessary. They weren’t bad and I’d let them through the review, because he got the job done, he understood most of what was going on and was learning the language as he went along. But I was only able to detect it because I spoke to him daily and could gauge his level of understanding more accurately. Had he submitted the code he did anonymously, in a one off PR to an opensource project that is anti-AI, I guarantee you, it would’ve gotten merged.
because his level of the programming language wasn’t that high but the code constructs he was using were advanced and sometimes unnecessary. They weren’t bad and I’d let them through the review, because he got the job done
That sounds more like you just let inefficient code that the programmer can’t maintain through the review process. Shit like that is why software is getting continually worse
I would go even further and say that somebody who doesn’t understand the importance of maintenability in software development and lets unmaintaineable code through is functionally him or herself a junior developer.
If something is way harder to go through to fix bugs or add new functionally than it should, that means you’re just paying in maintenance time the bill which should’ve been paid during coding time, and maintenance time “bills” are way more expensive because its far more time costly to track down bugs and if the thing is already in production you often have the added cost of having to fix side effects of the bug such as corrupt data.
I dunno man as someone that reads a lot of AI slop for a living I’ve gotten pretty good at sifting out when someone actually wrote a doc and when someone just shat it out with Claude. They all have their specific tells and ways of meandering around the point that just doesn’t exist.
I know people like to think so, but there was an empirical study done with professors who said they could recognise AI submitted work from their students and were wrong 50% of the time.
If you want CoPilot, go back to Microslop
No thanks, fuck macroslop
Removed by mod
Fucking hell, please keep a better tone. Screaming and shouting because you disagree with someone, and even going as far as actually calling them a rapist, not for something they have done, but merely for voicing their support of something, is so inflamed that it’s good for nothing but starting a fire. If you approach people you disagree with like that, then you are certainly doing your part in destroying Lemmy as a platform that can support real and honest discussions, and a genuine exchange of viewpoints.
And for the record, I’m about as against these LLMs as can be, so no, I’m not calling you out because of any disagreement in that regard.
No, fuck that, and fuck you for defending it.
People are pushing back against trying to force AI into KDE because they don’t want to have AI continually pushed into their face. Nothing’s stopping the people that want AI from getting it through their browser or adding it from various other packages through flathub. It doesn’t need to be added to the DE. That just leads to enshittification like Windows underwent. We don’t need that in Linux.
The issue that AI bros continually don’t understand is the idea of consent. If someone doesn’t want AI pushed to the, then the appropriate action is to stop pushing it onto them.
Then in comes the asshole I responded to with the “bUt HaVe YoU cOnSiDeReD tHiS uSe CaSe???1?” bullshit. Again, I stated that people shouldn’t be forced to have AI pushed on them and the guy continued to push it on people. They’re acting like a door-to-door salesman that jams their foot into the door before you can close it.
Again, to paraphrase Louis Rossmann: that lack of understanding of consent is a rapist mentality.
Tone policing is a load of bullshit. The AI bros don’t understand regular pushback, if they even care at all. They won’t understand unless you shock them awake.
My prime motivator for moving to KDE after my years on Gnome was the feeling of sleekness, of less bloat.
Right now, using AI in any manner other than a rubber duck or search engine is kind of guaranteeing that you end up with a bloated mess.
I hope they can find a sensible middle ground - I say middle, but I mean more of a 95% no AI, 5% feel free to use it as a SO alternative when searching for issues.
What’s GNOME’s stance on this?
Nothing global at the moment but some projects within GNOME already ban AI contributions. There is a discussion about it on the forums. I think it looks a little bit better for now. At least you don’t get banned for saying that you have ethical concerns like KDE is now doing.
Seriously? They’re banning people now over them having ethical concerns???
And the crazy part is nobody seems to have listened to the talk?
Yes there was some ambiguity, but AI was always an additional tool, and the focus was
- Changing the desktop paradigm to solve tasks rather than work with files (nothing new)
- Stressing ethical, small and local models
- Protecting users that de facto already use agents and CLI tools with sandboxes and safeguards inside the OS, including automatic masking of personal data. This is really cool and important!
Also dont forget that this was an idea to play around with, not “we want KDE to only be this now”
I did (and the talk has a very high view count on youtube). The guy is a good presenter, and seems aware of his audience, and I thought his ideas for the desktop were interesting, but everything he was saying and showing was entirely full of holes that could be poked into it, and is something that was, uh, unnecessary to present.
It’s easier to be angry if you avoid looking at things that don’t confom to your beliefs
that…doesn’t make any sense
If you only see things that conform to your beliefs what need is there for anger ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
an echo chamber is defined as an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs, by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.
The person I responded to was referring to people commenting who haven’t seen the video which forms the basis for this entire thread.
My comment is a tongue in cheek reference to the fact that people choose to impose echo chambers upon themselves by avoiding any media which would present information which may challenge their beliefs because feeling self-righetous and angry is a lot easier than taking the time to understand a topic.
As to not understanding how people could be angry when they only hear things which conforms to their beliefs, I’d direct your attention to politics for the past 50 years.
ah, i see.
that sentence as a standalone makes no sense, with the context it’s still borderline but i can see how you got there.
We can pretend AI isn’t being used or won’t be used by devs contributing to opensource projects, but that won’t change reality. You can “ban” AI in your projects but all that will do is lead to people who use AI to not say it openly. Those unable to understand the output of the AI will be caught, but those that do, won’t.
IMO, it would be better to have a policy that says “It doesn’t matter whether you, your cousin, or AI wrote it, you must understand everything you submit to us.”
LLM code has no business being in a licensed open source project. It’s code is generated from stolen and scraped projects with no provenance.
It will end up there anyway. It’s like trying to ban prostitution and drugs.
Of course you can ban AI use. Nobody says theft is pointless to ban just because some people will get away with it. The discussion also isn’t just on technical terms. The companies behind these models and the damage they are doing to the environment and our societies are a big reason for the dislike of this technology.
Theft isn’t banned, it’s illegal. Those are two different things. But those are semantics. AI companies are being sued for theft, the product they made from it isn’t illegal, the process of them making it is.
It’s like chocolate: it is made by child labor, which is illegal, yet you and your friends or family love chocolate cake, pudding, or whatever product is made from chocolate. Do you think chocolate should be prohibited as a product because the majority of its sourcing comes from child labor? Or the phone you hold in your hands being made from resources gained through, you guessed it, child labor theft, corruption, and war instigation (aka organized murder), should phones as such be banned? The clothes you wear on your back are also probably made from labor that is underpaid, done in unsafe conditions, etc.
There are many things I consider more despicable and worth fighting for, and that list may be different that yours. For whatever reason you’re dismissing what I just said, consider that somebody else has that same misgiving about your stance on AI and the arbitrary line in the sand you drew.
