KDE and AI, and you, and me

So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that.

I’m going to leave the comments on this post open, but I will request that everyone who wants to comment read and understand the entire post first.

So anyway…

What happened?

Here’s a verifiable timeline of events:

1. Several weeks ago, a KDE developer started a mailing list thread asking about how we should handle the flood of AI slop merge requests.
2. Everyone agreed it was a problem, and that we don’t want that crap.
3. There was less certainty about the best way to handle it socially.
4. Several wished for an official policy so we didn’t all have to figure it out on our own.
5. I proposed a set of draft guidelines making it quite clear that slop merge requests are unwanted, and can be ignored or closed.
6. It received a generally positive reception.
7. Another KDE developer requested that we workshop it somewhere more modern and capable.
8. I got busy and didn’t do so.
9. Several weeks later, various people on the internet discovered that a talk proposing “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” had been accepted at Akademy 2026 and created drama around it.
10. Akademy happened, and the talk was given to what I’m told was a fairly chilly reception.
11. The next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception.
12. Realizing this topic was not going away, later that day I re-opened a second draft of my LLM guidelines on invent.kde.org.
13. KDE contributors began to discuss the draft proposal.
14. Two people unknown to any KDE contributors appeared and began fighting with one another about the broader topic of the morality of AI, not the proposed guidelines.
15. One of those people doxxed the other.
16. Comments on the draft proposal were locked to only KDE developers.
17. The person who doxxed the other was banned.
18. Later, the identity of the doxxed person was verified, and they were also banned for their conduct outside of KDE being so unacceptable that people inside KDE did not want to associate with them.
19. Someone else outside of KDE set up https://kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to brigade KDE into banning LLMs.
20. A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors (I see one person I know in there).
21. The topic was picked up on social media and the press with… varying levels of accuracy.
22. The draft proposal was removed and the whole topic hidden.

TL;DR:

A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE’s attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage.

Yep, that’s where we’re at in the state of online discourse around AI.

I’m sorry

After everything I wrote last month about keeping your community safe and containing damage so it doesn’t spill out into public view, I feel pretty bad that my attempt to craft a compromise policy around LLM usage in KDE (which would have tightened it!) backfired and created a storm of drama.

It wasn’t my intention, and I apologize for my role in it. If I make another attempt to craft a policy that provides certainty and cover for maintainers who want to reject AI slop, I will be even more careful to avoid creating unnecessary drama. If someone else wants to, I will try my best to help them with the same.

More facts

People jumped to some pretty wild conclusions in the various social media threads about the topic that I saw. Before we continue, let me set some more records straight:

• KDE e.V. has not taken money from DHH or Omarchy. I also have not, either personally, or in my business.
• KDE e.V. has taken money from Framework, but only after verifying that Framework had severed their (already very limited) ties with DHH and Omarchy. Also, all of this happened a year ago, before Omarchy received a ludicrous amount of money from a veritable rogues gallery of villains.
• Today, Omarchy is radioactive in KDE and adjacent communities I’m aware of. Nobody I know wants to have anything to do with them.
• The “lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” idea was presented by two people important to KDE in years past, but with no contributions in over a decade. Their idea does not reflect the overall direction of KDE or Plasma, and I don’t think it ever will. If “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” freaks you out, I believe it is completely reasonable and safe to ignore.

What on earth is going on here?

I know people are really riled up about AI. I get it. The negative effects of LLM usage seem to become more obvious by the day:

• They lower the barrier to entry for people who have no idea what they’re doing to DDoS FOSS maintainers with a tidal wave of crap. And this was the actual reason for the proposed restrictions.
• They make it easy for lazy people to avoid learning communication and job skills.
• They make it easy for lonely people to form unhealthy para-social relationships.
• The companies behind the big ones are really bad.
• Some of their training data was stolen.
• Some of their training data that was not stolen results in the destruction of rare books.
• The process of training them on freely available online data imposes extra hosting costs and slows down access for humans, acting as economic free riders.
• The license of source code they produce is legally unclear.
• Their resource usage frequently strains the infrastructure of the communities their data centers are located in or near.
• Their data centers are using enough electricity to blunt and reverse prior positive global trends of lower electricity demand and greener electricity generation.
• The specialized hardware they use has monopolized global production lines, massively inflating the price of normal consumer and business computer hardware.
• The enormous amount of capital allocated to them may be impossible to recoup, with the potential to eventually cause a worldwide economic crash.
• They are either mandated or voluntarily used by so many people already, that many who do not use them fear they will “fall behind” or “become obsolete” despite concerns with any of the above.

So yeah, bad stuff. I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well.

I also understand why a lot of experts in their field really like LLMs. These are very powerful and sophisticated tools. Capable people with decades of experience can successfully automate away a lot of tedious work, and still end up with a final product identical to what they would have done by hand.

I don’t use LLMs for automating work myself, but I do understand the appeal to many experts.

And I also understand that LLMs can be responsibly used in really useful ways for general tasks like learning a nebulous skill, retrieving deeply-buried information you can only describe in unspecific ways, or helping you troubleshoot a problem with unclear steps or parameters.

At the same time, I think we have to acknowledge that irresponsible LLM usage by people who are not yet experts is a disaster for their learning, expertise, social skills, and emotional health.

In other words, this is a hard problem.

What on earth do we do?

How are we expected to handle a technology that is:

1. Very powerful
2. Genuinely useful for various things
3. Dangerous, de-skilling, and/or addictive in the wrong hands
4. Full of really bad externalities
5. Broadly available worldwide at effectively zero cost

It’s like 100 billion toaster-sized nuclear reactors dropped from the sky one day. The very least you can say is that this would be very de-stabilizing!

The world is changing fast and I have no idea what’s going to happen. But I don’t think the genie is going to be put back in the bottle. I don’t know what to do, and that’s scary. And I have a lot of empathy for anyone else who’s scared by this, too. We’re in this boat together.

What can you do to help?

If I or someone else tries again to propose a set of usage guidelines that restrict inexpert usage of LLMs, with the goal that KDE receives fewer of the AI slop merge requests that are burning people out, please don’t make things worse.

Please don’t derail the process.

Please don’t take it as an opportunity to fight over the broader topic of AI in general.

Please don’t try to burn each other to the ground over it.

Please don’t doxx or send hate mail to anyone over it.

Please, just be kind. We’re all trying our best over here. No one in FOSS is a cackling techbro… outside of maybe Omarchy. 😬 The rest of us are trying to figure out what to do about the nuclear reactor that fell into our living room without killing ourselves, hurting anyone else, or becoming unemployable.

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If at this point you want to post a comment, please be kind and treat the topic with an adult level of maturity. I believe in you. 🙂