Fedora’s “AI” policy process highlights rift between IBM/Red Hat and Fedora

A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the “AI” bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project’s been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of “AI”, and LWN.net’s Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion:

There appears to be a growing tension between what Red Hat and IBM would like to see from Fedora versus what its users and community contributors want from the project. Red Hat and IBM have already come down in favor of AI as part of their product strategies, the only real questions are what to develop and offer to the customers or partners.

The Fedora community, on the other hand, has quite a few people who feel strongly against AI technologies for various ethical, practical, and social reasons. The results, so far, of turning people loose with generative AI tools on unsuspecting open-source projects has not been universally positive. People join communities to collaborate with other people, not to sift through the output of large language models. It is possible that Red Hat will persuade Fedora to formally endorse a policy of accepting AI-assisted content, but it may be at the expense of users and contributors.
↫ Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net

Reading through Brockmeier’s excellent article, the various forces pulling and pushing on Fedora become quite clear, and the fact we’ve got IBM/Red Hat in favour of “AI”, and Fedora’s community of developers and users against it, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Wherever “AI” makes an appearance, it’s almost exclusively a top-down process with corporate interests pushing “AI” hard on a largely indifferent userbase. It seems Fedora is no different.

The massive rift between IBM/Red Hat on one side, and the Fedora community on the other is probably best illustrated by a remark from Graham White, technical lead for the Granite AI agents at IBM. One of the earlier policy proposals referenced “AI” slop, and White was offended by this, stating:

I’ve been working in the industry and building AI models for a shade over 20 years and never come across “AI slop”. This seems derogatory to me and an unnecessary addition to the policy.
↫ Graham White, as quoted by Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net

Us regular users are bombarded with “AI” slop every day, and I just can’t understand how disconnected from reality you must be to not only deny it’s a problem, but to deny its existence entirely, when virtually every single Google query will drop you in “AI” muck. If such denial is commonplace within IBM/Red Hat, it’s really no wonder there’s such a big rift between them and Fedora. It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Fedora is having such a hard time formulating an “AI” policy.

The current version of the proposed policy seems to view “AI” and its use in or by Fedora mildly positively, which certainly has me, as a Fedora/KDE user, on edge. I don’t want “AI” anywhere near my operating system for a whole variety of reasons, and if the upcoming vote on the new policy ends up in favour of it, I might have to consider moving away from Fedora.