For context, I have been using a pretty niche OS on my phone for a long time but recently the community and the 3rd party appstores are flooded with LLM content - and fans. Its ethical, geopolitical and societal dangers are handwaved away at best, or ridiculed or countered with stupid non-arguments (“you wouldn’t tell a farmer not to use a tractor”).
Everybody is in a hurry to churn out the next pretty port of an Android app.
The actual OS devs have not taken any sort of public stance, not even in comments.
And it got me thinking. If this continues maybe LineageOS & F-Droid (no Gapps of course) might turn out to be a better alternative again, despite it being essentially Android and Not True Linux.
But how do they position themselves with AI?
If you want to suggest a 3rd option, please do so - but only if it works reliably as a daily driver - incl. telephony and messaging - on at least a small number of consumer devices that are no older than 8 years.
And only if they clearly position themselves against AI in code and generally.
@A_norny_mousse@piefed.social wrote:
For context, I have been using a pretty niche OS on my phone for a long time but recently the community and the 3rd party appstores are flooded with LLM content - and fans.
That pretty much sounds like Sailfish OS. Looks like a bunch of new people (along with me too fwiw), got the new Jolla Phone and (rightfully, I might say) found the software space pretty barren. So they started filling Openrepos with all sorts of vibe coded stuff for just about anything - from Spotify, to YouTube, to LinkedIn, and now they’re trying to port open source projects too.
If I am indeed correct about the whole thing, how feasible would be for you to use non-AI F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid apps through AAS instead?
Answering myself wrt F-Droid:
tl;dr: the situation appears very similar to what I describe in my OP.
- They seem very focused on fighting Google’s recent shenanigans and getting funded, and FOSS of course.
- I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their CoC
- I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their list of anti-features, and this seems to be the biggest indicator to me.
- Not in their Blog either (by title, going back one year) but my search engine gave me this article, which seems to have been removed since: Home much of F-Droid is LLM-generated.
- There’s a forum post asking a similar question with some very predictable drama. Straight out the door some “contributor” ridicules OP’s reasonable question in that typical, passive-aggressive smiley emoji coder way. Just what I have experienced. Thankfully other “contributors” at least see the value in pondering these things. While the question is never fully answered, the thread contains some interesting links to how other FOSS projects position themselves.
I found an important clue in the latter:
the watered down "Open Source AI Definition” that Mufelli pushed through the OSI.
https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition
Straight away I don’t agree with it:
Why we need Open Source Artificial Intelligence
I’m guessing this is to be seen as a quasi-official stance to AI that most F(L)OSS will adopt or at least base their own policies on…
F-droid has no problem with “AI” whatsoever. That goes for vibe coded apps as well as ones where the “AI” is a front facing function. Me, I’d prefer it was considered an anti-feature.
Then, you can still find several regularly updated cryptocurrency apps on F-droid, too, so the maintainers must have a sweet tooth for idiot grifts 🤷
I mainly use F-Droid and unfortunately I’d say a lot of the “new” and “recently updated” apps seem like they were most likely made with AI.
Idk if it’ll be easy to find an open source app store that completely restricts AI content, because that means somebody would have to be manually monitoring it and investigating each project that’s uploaded, which most OSS doesn’t have the capacity for.
apps seem like they were most likely made with AI.
Thanks but I was thinking about their actual policy, regarding.
that means somebody would have to be manually monitoring it and investigating
I don’t think we have to go that far just yet.
Speaking from experience, there’s quite a bit of self-policing within such communities; a clear positioning from the project helps a lot.the F-Droid repository IzzyOnDroid has pretty good AI policy. (#)
We are strongly opposed to apps which are fully or in part created by generative AI tools.
pretty good
I’m not sure what compromise I would strike if I was in their position, but I don’t like how everybody in IT basically accepts that some AI usage is fine.
I know why and I don’t want to argue about it.
It just makes me sad: “ethical arguments aside, you have to admit that there is some benefit…”What people used to say about Google. Took over a decade to discover that maybe these things they “put aside” for something that delivers convenience for free, were pretty important after all.
Definitely agree with you, but as I said originally, OSS doesn’t really have the capacity to tackle this stuff… You can’t say “we have no AI apps” if you don’t have a way to constantly be checking and guaranteeing that.
However, if this is really a major problem for you, maybe try contributing to a project you like? Look for AI apps and send take-down requests to the devs of the app store you found them on.
Might not be the simplest solution, but as the saying goes, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
You can’t say “we have no AI apps” if you don’t have a way to constantly be checking and guaranteeing that.
Huge parts of society rely on mostly unenforceable honor rules and it works. Never 100% of course, but it does.
