policies: add slop policy

Signed-off-by: James Calligeros <[email protected]>

Author: chadmed

docs/project/policies/slop.md

@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+---
+title: Generative AI Policy
+---
+
+It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred
+to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools,
+particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.
+
+The use of Slop Generators in _any_ contribution to the Asahi Linux project is
+expressly forbidden. Their use in any material capacity where code, documentation,
+engineering decisions, etc. are largely created with the "help" of a Slop Generators
+will be met with a single warning. Subsequent disregard for this policy will be
+met with an immediate and permanent ban from the Asahi Linux project and all
+associated spaces.
+
+## Illegal output
+All of the popular Slop Generators are trained on an incomprehensibly large corpus
+of text. There is ample evidence across the Web of this training material including
+copyrighted material, brazenly stolen by the Slop Generator proprietors with
+impunity. Due to the nature of Slop Generators, they are prone to regurgitating
+their training corpus almost verbatim. This presents a challenge for FOSS projects
+in that the use of generated slop is highly likely to violate intellectual property
+law by way of regurgitating the aforementioned stolen training material. This
+likelihood is proportional to the specificity of the problem area.
+
+Asahi Linux is a _highly_ specific project, working in esoteric problem spaces
+on publicly undocumented hardware. Given the techniques used by Slop Generator
+manufacturers, it is not impossible for them to have confidential or leaked
+material owned by Apple or its vendor partners in their training corpi. It is
+therefore likely that Slop Generators will regurgitate this when queried in just
+the right way. We already forbid the use of illegally acquired or leaked
+documentation and tooling (e.g. Apple's internal repair diagnostic tools). This
+also applies to regurgitated slop.
+
+FOSS projects like Asahi Linux cannot afford costly intellectual property lawsuits
+in US courts. The current political situation in that nation also makes it
+incredibly unlikely that any FOSS project would win such a suit regardless of
+the quality of its defence.
+
+## Waste of resources
+Slop Generators consume an unfathomable amount of resources we can scarcely afford
+to waste. Training, and to a lesser extent inference, require enormous amounts of
+energy, water, land, and hardware. Manufacturing the hardware itself requires enormous
+amounts of energy, water and minerals. All parts of the Slop Generator supply chain
+are environmentally intensive. These resources are better used on quite literally
+anything else.
+
+## LMGTFY
+An emerging trend we have observed is people copying user questions or posts into
+a Slop Generator, then replying to the post with the generated slop. This is
+occurring with increasing frequency, particularly on Reddit. For some people it
+is tempting to "help" others and answer questions by feeding them to a LLM and
+then posting the answer as-is, or lightly edited at best. If this is you, please
+realise that others also have access to the same models as you do, and if they
+wanted an answer from one, they could have asked it themselves. Doing this is
+exactly as helpful as posting a LMGTFY link, and everyone else _will_ view your
+actions as if you did exactly that.
+
+## It's just matmul
+It is very easy to get caught up in the hype that bad actors have built around
+Slop Generators. The anthropomorphic presentation of Slop Generators as "agents"
+or "assistants" is a very deliberate attempt to manufacture consent for their
+integration into workforces at the expense of human interaction. The implication
+of some higher degree intelligence or sentience is very much deliberate, and it
+is very much false.
+
+Make no mistake, they cannot think. They cannot reason. They cannot take into
+account context. They don't "know" things or have a sense of humour or any of the
+other human-centric qualities bad actors would have you believe of them. Slop
+Generators are a [chain of matrices in a stochastic system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain).
+The output of a Slop Generator is nothing more than a statistical calculation,
+where the next word to be generated is decided by an opaque probabilistic
+function dependent on previously generated words. This is fundamentally the
+same mathematics that is used to predict the weather.
+
+A Slop Generator cannot assess the veracity of its claims, nor can it ever
+tell you that it simply does not know something. Slop Generators
+are often _confidently incorrect_ as a result, and require brow-beating
+to admit a mistake. They are therefore highly inappropriate tools in contexts where
+truth and correctness are of utmost importance, and when the user is not already
+highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area. This presents a bit of
+an issue for Slop Generators; if the user is already highly knowledgeable and
+confident in the problem area, then why ask the Slop Generator in the first place?

mkdocs.yml

@@ -18,6 +18,8 @@ nav:
     - When will Asahi Linux be done?: project/when-will-asahi-be-done.md
     - References: project/references.md
     - Asahi Linux Board: project/board/asahi-board.md
+    - Policies:
+        - Generative AI: project/policies/slop.md
   - Platform documentation:
     - Apple Silicon Subsystems: platform/subsystems.md
     - Apple Platform Security Crash Course: platform/security.md