Human Emacs
56 points by tusharhero
56 points by tusharhero
LLM-generated contributions free (possible) fork of GNU Emacs.
I'm not an emacs user, but it is heartening to see firm declarations like this pledging to protect fundamental development tools from slop and its enthusiasts.
We are concerned that this upcoming GNU policy may not hold Emacs to the high ethical standard that GNU has historically held.
Why’s that? Is GNU going to eventually allow LLMs (very mostly non-free) near any of their software?
It's a fair question.
The first thing is, the correct course of action here is very easy. The fact that they haven't already done the very easy thing is the first red flag.
If you look at other GNU projects, there is a lot of pushback to a policy that is grounded in ethical behavior primarily. Even guix, which I would say has the project leadership I trust most among all GNU projects, is still deliberating what to do about it: https://codeberg.org/guix/guix-consensus-documents/pulls/13
GNU historically has been myopically focused on license and copyright at the expense of every other consideration. Part of the concern is that some LLM enthusiasts will come up with an argument that the licensing situation is actually fine, and then since GNU can't see beyond licensing, there will be no further discussion of the myriad other problems.
Of course, it's certainly possible that GNU will do the right thing and all this will be for nothing. That is the ideal outcome we are hoping for.
There's some people in the community that think that if it's an open weight model then it's good enough and we should use it. I was very surprised to see that one of the most important news sites about Linux in Spanish had a piece talking about "why do you hate AI so much?"0 while trying to argue (badly) why the critics are wrong and that "open source AI (sic)" should be welcomed.
PS: I'm a no one in the Emacs community, just a user. Can I sign the petition?
PS: I'm a no one in the Emacs community, just a user. Can I sign the petition?
I'm a mere user, and have signed it. I think it is important that we sign it too.
Yes; this is for users and contributors both. The site explains how to get added but if you message me a name and optional URL I can add you that way too.
Most likely no. FSF is super cautious with this from what I hear from some FSF people. The difference here is that this is not an ethical problem according to GNU's philosophy (at least explicitly it is not, many free software devs are against LLMs for ethical reasons.) But concern about copyright-ability of such code, which could nullify the copyleft.
Still, we have seen too many projects doing this. I think it is necessary to prepare before it happens.
rsync have aggressively adopted LLM
I thought we just read about rsync contribs that were rejected due to LLM smell.
I think you're confusing it with another project? I couldn't find anything like that in the recent stories. I did however find confirmation of LLM use.
LLMs will improve Emacs in areas where it hasn't been possible before. They will enhance it, as has already happened with very complex bugs and abstraction layers that required a lot of work.
The motivation is all about ethics.
quoting from the Not Under Discussion section
We are not here to discuss whether LLMs are effective at what they are claimed to be able to do; their effectiveness is not at all relevant to the question of whether their use can be part of a principled software movement dedicated to user empowerment.