I nearly lost my cool at the Stellenbosch sprint. It was bad enough, that one of the participants kept trying to offload our brainstorms to an AI chatbot. When the whole point of the strategy session was the process of jointly converging on shared core values, and internalizing that convergence — if you short-circuit that process and outsource the outcome, the outcome would have no value. It would be just words, instead of a deeply felt conviction that we’re on a mission together.
What pushed me over the edge was another participant, who repeatedly insisted Plone should be an “AI-first CMS”. Surely we’ve all seen the massive community backlash, when Firefox declared itself to be an “AI-first browser”? My blood was boiling. After the third such statement, I shouted: “AI is toxic!” He was clearly surprised by that. As I was surprised by his surprise. Because everybody knows that AI is toxic, right? It’s friggin obvious, innit?
Apparently not.
Let’s talk
Thankfully, the Plone people are a bunch of nice guys. Over lunch, my AI-first colleague and I got together and quickly found that despite our differences, we have a lot of common ground when it comes to AI in open source. We started working on a joint position statement, and figuring out a process to widen our conversation to the whole community.
I wrote a blog post, to document where I’m coming from: the stuff I read which makes it so blindingly obvious to me that AI is toxic. You can read the full post on my blog:
The next post in this series tries to outline a way forward: how do we relate to the current AI hype, without damaging our community?
I hope to start a constructive and productive community dialogue about this topic. This is not about blocking AI or whatever. It’s about engaging with it in a way that supports our shared values. And it’s definitely about communicating about AI in a way that makes Plone stronger.
This is how it works, usually. Hyper hype new things, everyone knows about and try them, get a lot of resources, 1% can use them to do a real change. How cars, mobile phone has been introduced and then became a standard?
When I started looking at the work advertisements, It was full of "driver license needed". Now they even ask you. Same for the mobile/smart phone. Wars are made collecting info about your enemy and killing hundreds just to get some points.
People usually is scared and adapt until they find to be at the top of the list to be hit by the change.
We used to bash other societies because they don't have fancy cars and commodities. The hype is an outcome of commodity fetishism. We already know it.
Your blog posts are missing "what is to be done". That is the hard part.
I have read your blogs completely and it literally made me think about it specially the psychological trauma part and the ecological and social damage. Climate change was never a human problem. It has always been a capitalist problem. I have subscribed to your newsletter and waiting for the upcoming blog. Until then I would love to explore and research more on this.
Thanks Yuri. My second blog post will go deeper into the “what is to be done?” question. But most importantly I think we need the community hive mind to find the answer to that!
Let's talk about the good things that we achieved (those that I know of) lately:
@jensens came up with a new native ZODB storage with JSON as storage format in Postgres
@zopyx developed a complete new solution for doing forms and surveys in Plone which is ages ahead of what we have in Plone so far. See https://demo.privacyforms.studio/
AI is not about intelligence, it's the statistical parrot.
I studied computer science and AI in the 90s and the AI of the 80s and 90s is completely different from the AI to today. At that time, parts of the AI research was about modelling knowledge, building expert system and trying to model knowledge and researching knowledge representation.
20-30 years later, this research became more or less a dead end. The "old" AI approach has not helped very much solving real world problems. The current statistical parrots in terms of LLMs can be very helpful and beneficial.