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vleermuis-admin
4b3334d7a6 missing word 2026-05-02 23:09:32 +02:00
vleermuis-admin
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2879c92596 clean up the "why not llms" section to have more brought overarching categories and a prologue 2026-05-01 16:51:03 +02:00

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@ -1287,7 +1287,19 @@ All-in-one solutions for stitching together a desktop.
# Why not LLMs?
Could use some help writing this with concrete receipts on environmental, social, political, and economic/labor harms.
As a brief explanation of the reasoning behind this repo, we are against AI for the following reasons:
- legal issues
- ethical issues
- poor code quality
We've broken down all of those sections and more below, but before you dive into that, one of the common questions and discussions that happens here is, "if something ever had slop in it, how can it ever be good again?" and that's usually in relation to projects that have dropped AI or projects that are forks of something that once had AI in it. We believe strongly that you can always be better and you can also reduce harm. In the same way you wouldn't consider a vegetarian "not a vegetarian" because they once ate meat even though they no longer eat meat, we don't consider a project permenantly tainted if they once used AI but now do not <sup>See our [removal requirements](https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#removal) for more details</sup>.
You can always be a better person and communities can always be better communities.
We don't gatekeep being better.
Please feel free to open pull requests if you'd like to add more data to any section below, or if you have a suggestion for another section that you think would be helpful to include.
## Legal Ramifications
@ -1319,25 +1331,6 @@ AI companies use data from across the web for training their models, most often
FOSS projects listed in this repo are using tooling that blatantly disregard licensing and violate of Codes of Conduct, making said tools antithetical to FOSS' purpose.
## Environmental Impact
To start learning a bit more, you can checkout the wikipedia page on [Environmental impact of artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_artificial_intelligence#Individual_level). We're very open to people contributing other explanations, links, and resources to learn more about this. Here's what we've gathered so far:
- [MIT News: Generative AIs environmental impact](https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117)
- [MIT Technology Review: We did the math on AIs energy footprint. Heres the story you havent heard.](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/)
## Labor
AI usage and normalization contributes to labor violations in many ways that are obvious and some you may not be aware of.
On one hand, many things that you think are "AI" are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot for you for either extremely low wages or in some cases, no wages e.g. prison labor. This is particularly common for "friend"/"sex" bots, but it is also extremely common in the image/video identification. You can find a bit more info at the following links:
- [Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AIs development](https://theconversation.com/long-hours-and-low-wages-the-human-labour-powering-ais-development-217038)
- [OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/)
- ['AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back](https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/)
- [These Prisoners Are Training AI: In high-wage Finland, where clickworkers are rare, one company has discovered a novel labor force—prisoners.](https://web.archive.org/web/20260108224812/https://www.wired.com/story/prisoners-training-ai-finland/)
- [Amazon grocery stores previously reported to use AI actually used people in India](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4?op=1)
## Poor Code Quality
Vibe coding / agentic workflows result in poorer code quality, and relaxed oversight practices. These effects may be compounded by the common practice of using additional LLM-based tooling to provide code-reviews.
@ -1367,7 +1360,28 @@ This also often results in massive security holes.
* [In a study evaluating over 500k code samples, LLM-generated code was found to contain more high-risk security vulnerabilities than human-generated code](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634)
* [LLMs make up package names, making them vulnerable to incorporating malicious code in "slopsquatting" attacks](https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/) ([Arxiv study](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10279))
## Health and Safety
## Ethical Issues
### Environmental Impact
To start learning a bit more, you can checkout the wikipedia page on [Environmental impact of artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_artificial_intelligence#Individual_level). We're very open to people contributing other explanations, links, and resources to learn more about this. Here's what we've gathered so far:
- [MIT News: Generative AIs environmental impact](https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117)
- [MIT Technology Review: We did the math on AIs energy footprint. Heres the story you havent heard.](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/)
### Labor
AI usage and normalization contributes to labor violations in many ways that are obvious and some you may not be aware of.
On one hand, many things that you think are "AI" are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot for you for either extremely low wages or in some cases, no wages e.g. prison labor. This is particularly common for "friend"/"sex" bots, but it is also extremely common in the image/video identification. You can find a bit more info at the following links:
- [Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AIs development](https://theconversation.com/long-hours-and-low-wages-the-human-labour-powering-ais-development-217038)
- [OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic](https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/)
- ['AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back](https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/)
- [These Prisoners Are Training AI: In high-wage Finland, where clickworkers are rare, one company has discovered a novel labor force—prisoners.](https://web.archive.org/web/20260108224812/https://www.wired.com/story/prisoners-training-ai-finland/)
- [Amazon grocery stores previously reported to use AI actually used people in India](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4?op=1)
### Health and Safety
There's been a number of high profile incidents that have resulted in endangerment or death. Here's some examples: