You have an appropriate amount of paranthesis in your comment about Guix.

The policy doesn't seem to be a full ban on AI within the distribution's infrastructure, permitting some usage such as for translation and for research.

For anything else, this would be a mild annoyance to me.

For a Linux distribution, not fully banning AI is a dealbreaker for me due to the direction that the Linux kernel is going. Thus the resistance that a Linux distribution does against AI must be stronger for me to consider it, especially when there are other Unix-like OSes that have less AI-generated code due to not using the Linux kernel.

This line of thinking also helps me narrow down Linux distributions to recommend.

They recently changed their policy to forbid AI: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

I see. Translation part is fine in my opinion but I too am not so sure about the research part and it can lead to something wrong even though the code is not written by it in the first hand.

Long live NetBSD then!

I recommend you read this article.

Also look at the history of the Linux kernel and you'll see that GPL does not protect against corporate interests from taking over.

They allow LLM contributions tho...

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology ... is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

Holy fuck, secureblue sounds amazing.

Anyone try it here?

I hate AI, the way it is generally being used, and the harm it is causing to society, our environment, our cognitive abilities. All of that said, it is difficult to be a purist. You just do your best and when it comes to operating systems, that is especially true. What I value most in an operating system is privacy, security, and ease of use (mostly just works). So for me, I need to find that in a distro with a AI use policy I can live with. That’s a sliding scale, not all or nothing. Factoring in that alternative OSes might be worse on the AI front or less useful out of the box, and I’m just staying out for now. If an alternative can compete on those fronts, I’ll consider switching.

With the current state of things, if a software distribution includes Linux, it includes AI assisted code. Maybe something like NetBSD? I'm not even sure if anything is AI free anymore.

Makes sense to me. As I said, I'd find this a mild annoyance (at worst even!) if this weren't a Linux distribution. Could (theoretically anyways) be fine enough for OP though.

It’s a losing battle.

Projects that seem to take a clear anti-AI stance today can change their stance in the future. Linus went from being kinda AI-cautious to AI-pilled in the span of a year. I’ve seen the same with today AI-pilled coworkers who just one year ago were AI-skeptic.

An operating system also consists of many different parts made by different people, each having their own stance with regards to AI use. It’s impossible to keep a track how all of these projects change their stance over time.

Yeah, we're in a pickle and I don't like this at all. The core problem is kernel itself though and no distro has enough menpower to maintain a no-AI kernel on parallel. I don't want to imagine how things will be 20 years later at this rate.