Group policy on commercial LLM-generated content

Hello,

Since I put the LLM policy item on the agenda, I think I should try to make my position clear. I don’t think there’s any ethical way to use commercial LLMs. They are destructive in any dimension you choose to measure: to the open web, to users, to creators, to communities, to our global financial system, and to the ecosystem of the planet we live on.

I think that we should join GIMP[1], Servo[2], Loupe[3], Asahi Linux[4], CapyPDF[5], Zig[6], Gentoo Linux[7], OpenJDK[8], Linux Man Pages[9], and many others[10] in asserting a strict policy rejecting from our specifications, out of hand and without consideration, any content created, edited, summarized, formatted, or otherwise exposed to the output of LLMs.

Bethan, who writes far more eloquently than I do, has recently written about the corrosive role of LLMs on our communities: http://linguacelta.com/blog/2026/05/LLMs.html

I’m aware that there’s a lot of work we need to do to polish our specifications, but I’m very strongly of the opinion that human beings should do that work, not LLMs. In particular, I note that the single, primary function of an LLM is to take some input and generate *plausible* results. That plausibily is a statistical fact, but it is not reflective of any truth or understanding or comprehension.

Even if you find none of the arguments against using LLMs (ethical, financial, environmental, etc.) persuasive, consider, at least, that adding a bunch of plausible text to our specifications will not, in the long run, make them easier to read or understand, or easier to polish.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/blob/master/.gitlab/merge_request_templates/default.md?plain=1#L11-12
[2] https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started.html#ai-contributions
[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/loupe-no-longer-allows-generative-ai-contributions/27327
[4] https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
[5] https://github.com/jpakkane/capypdf/
[6] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/
[7] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
[8] https://openjdk.org/legal/ai
[9] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING.d/ai
[10] https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index

Written in a purely personal capacity,
Norm

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 2026 11:50:35 UTC