A real pain of AI is in how it reflects on the FOSS and self-hosting community's interactions.
The self hosted and foss communities want to be AI hating, and projects have existed without it, but this very concern of AI usage makes apparent a problem which already exists:
As frustrating as AI is, human interactions are worse.
Why?
- Few experts exist among so many choices: the more you know within your question, the fewer responses from other people (because even those who respond only have so much time and attention).
- Negative attitudes. AI never attacks anyone asking a question. Nor does it care whether you use AI, let alone any other common gate-keeping.
- There is a lack of documentation outside of most project repos, issues, merges, and pull requests. Understanding where to find things (aka bug reports being addressed or features being coded) can require hundreds, or even thousands, of hours of research on Github alone. Then add how few people use forums or wikis to document anything, but rather re-hash the same basic points in real-time chat with no follow up, no respect for time, and no discoverability or archiving possible.
- Human interactions just take time: to parse through attachments, consider options, test code and offer suggestions.
How does AI change any of this?
Fear and frustration bring up the underlying concern, which is primarily ignorance of the very code we are complaining about.
Receiving any contribution to any well-established project is an AI concern, because: What is the process for verification and validation? Who is responsible, and what happens if they refuse to disclose? These concerns can feel overwhelming and nonstop through the speed of modern machine learning interaction, plus it is always easier to react to problems, instead of proactively addressing how we enable this disconnection individually.
If we don't receive an answer we want, such as someone creating with AI, how can we respond in a manner that supports our goal of using self hosted tools we trust, plus still maintain some basic level of respect towards one another- especially towards the projects and developers we rely on. At this point AI is going nowhere, and our in-fighting continues to drive a fragmented community without any actual goal, because we need to come together more.
You may feel no incentive to change your attitude, but that also means we remove ourselves from having any agency. The #1 thing we can do is stop being rude and emotional in our interactions. Only through technical discussions can we move forward; if you are unable to have a technical discussion, just admit you do not know details and encourage others who may know more. Or, offer any level of research for context when questioning code. Empathy builds understanding, the desire to have trust and disclosure... and, it will drive fewer people towards needing AI because they feel supported in their human interactions.
Thank you for reading this, and see you in the self-hosting communities. Cheers.