How does the Elixir community feel about the ethical complexities of AI, OSS, and learning/teaching?

[AstonJ]

You may want to have a look at some of these threads too:

• How useful do you think AI tools are/will be? (Poll)
• What are your feelings on AI in general?
• In an age of AI, what can programming languages do to survive/compete?

@evnp

LLMs behind these tools likely trained on data taken from OSS authors without their permission, and without attribution ~ do the benefits of these tools for OSS outweigh this?

You’ve sort of answered this in your question (bit in bold). Most OSS contributions were made before AI existed, and if we look at what’s going on in the wider space we see there are numerous lawsuits against AI companies for essentially stealing other people’s work (lots of threads relating to this on Devtalk). It’s a bit different with OSS since most OS licences pretty much allow anyone to do whatever they want - tho it could be argued that the intent was significantly different back then - and that those licenses were more to offer ‘free to use’ type rights while offering guarantees in case the maintainer/s died or lost interest or changed their minds.

I expect the pushback from OSS will come a little later than say with artists, musicians and other industries which are being impacted more severely right now - because the impact in the dev industry may be felt a little later, through job losses (tho it’s already started) or AI companies essentially killing off languages once they’ve used them to get where/what they want.

Many would argue we should exercise caution - history tells us that big tech/capitalism on that level simply cannot be trusted:

@AstonJ

• In the beginning there is ‘healthy’ competition (where most languages will probably be treated well as the companies will be competing for customers/users).
• Over time smaller companies are acquired/swallowed up/go out of business (some languages may begin to get neglected or dropped at this stage).
• Eventually you end up with a small handful of companies who essentially control the market and more or less dictate what you’ll use (based on what we’ve seen from big tech already, probably their own or very closely affiliated languages).

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@evnp

LLM-driven-development may make it harder for the less-experienced among us (myself included, when it comes to Elixir/Phoenix) to learn our craft and build valuable experience ~ this is highly individualistic, but industry forces and corporate influences cannot be ignored when it comes to the pressures on the budding software dev in 2025.

There will probably be pros and cos, though some early indications are not good:

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

ChatGPT's Impact On Our Brains According to an MIT Study

It may be too early to tell - one thing may well be a given though, we probably don’t want to walk into the age of AI blindly or without caution…