Been a long time Debian user but with the recent AI decision I am planning on moving on so anyone have an anti-AI recommendations? I understand its being used in the kernel as well but are there any distros taking a full anti-AI approach to the parts of the code they control?
Since folks seem a little confused on what I am referring to here is the mailing list page regarding the use of gen ai without disclosure vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2026/08/msg00360.html
Phoronix article on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Votes-Responsible-AI-Use
Given Debian’s slow development and focus on stability above all else I doubt this will make any practical difference to contributions that actually end up in releases. And honestly at this point every OS or piece of software needs to have AI reviewing its codebase for vulnerabilities, even if it’s not making any code contributions.
I think if only submissions that follow a certain guideline are accepted then I doubt this will result in lower quality, it will even likely increase its quality by fixing relevant bugs. So I don’t think quality will degrade so long as parts of it don’t turn into 100% automated code factories.
The only thing that remains are the ethical challanges but hardly anything in this world is completely free of entanglement to ethically questionable practices. You use a lenovo to write code? They are probably funding millions into AI. You have a nvidia gpu in your computer? Yeah, ofcourse it is good to take a principled stand against corpo-fascism. But holier-than-thou approaches will only bite back.
But I don’t understand why people did not vote for accepting AI code but with disclosure. Seems like there is nothing to lose there even if you are an AI supporter. And could be useful for statistical purposes like analysing how human vs robot PR differ in things like rejection rate/severity of bugs found etc