AI in KDE Plasma

At the end of August, the results came out for a general resolution on the use of generative AI (LLMs) in Debian. Option 5 won: “Responsible use of generative AI.” The outcome — you can probably guess — left a lot of people unhappy. This week, it was the KDE project’s turn to end up in the crossfire while trying to propose a policy on the use (or non-use) of AI in its code. Tempers flared when ~the internet discovered that one of the talks at Akademy, the project’s annual event, proposed “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE,” pitched by two people who had been involved in KDE development in the past, but no longer are. Both attempts to draft the policy fell apart, and at the moment there’s no new proposal under discussion. On his blog, Nate Graham, one of the project’s most active developers and CEO of Techpaladin Software, a company that funds several parts of KDE, gave a detailed and thoughtful rundown of the situation. The initial drafts of the AI policy were written by him. Nate…