You can’t say “we have no AI apps” if you don’t have a way to constantly be checking and guaranteeing that.

Huge parts of society rely on mostly unenforceable honor rules and it works. Never 100% of course, but it does.

Answering myself wrt F-Droid:

tl;dr: the situation appears very similar to what I describe in my OP.

• They seem very focused on fighting Google’s recent shenanigans and getting funded, and FOSS of course.
• I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their CoC
• I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their list of anti-features, and this seems to be the biggest indicator to me.
• Not in their Blog either (by title, going back one year) but my search engine gave me this article, which seems to have been removed since: Home much of F-Droid is LLM-generated.
• There’s a forum post asking a similar question with some very predictable drama. Straight out the door some “contributor” ridicules OP’s reasonable question in that typical, passive-aggressive smiley emoji coder way. Just what I have experienced. Thankfully other “contributors” at least see the value in pondering these things. While the question is never fully answered, the thread contains some interesting links to how other FOSS projects position themselves.

I found an important clue in the latter:

the watered down "Open Source AI Definition” that Mufelli pushed through the OSI.

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Straight away I don’t agree with it:

Why we need Open Source Artificial Intelligence

I’m guessing this is to be seen as a quasi-official stance to AI that most F(L)OSS will adopt or at least base their own policies on…

apps seem like they were most likely made with AI.

Thanks but I was thinking about their actual policy, regarding.

that means somebody would have to be manually monitoring it and investigating

I don’t think we have to go that far just yet.
Speaking from experience, there’s quite a bit of self-policing within such communities; a clear positioning from the project helps a lot.

pretty good

I’m not sure what compromise I would strike if I was in their position, but I don’t like how everybody in IT basically accepts that some AI usage is fine.

I know why and I don’t want to argue about it.
It just makes me sad: “ethical arguments aside, you have to admit that there is some benefit…”

What people used to say about Google. Took over a decade to discover that maybe these things they “put aside” for something that delivers convenience for free, were pretty important after all.

At least I wait for it on company time.

You think I didn’t?

And yes, the story above was about getting them all up to Win11. It’s sad that IT-illiterates see “let’s do what M$ says” as the only option wrt security.

I remember that too! My crappy old computer. I bought the cheapest SSD they had and it was so much faster.

And I’ve been thinking about the latter too.

BTW I truly hope your Windows takes 5min for a cold boot, and not your Linux, because that would mean there’s something wrong with it or the hardware.

I always mean opensource, openweight models not OpenAI/Anthropic/X-AI crap

Honest question: is it even possible to separate oneself completely from AI’s multifaceted exploitation by using “FOSS AI”?

And if yes, does such ethically acceptable “FOSS AI” exist?

WINDOWS 11 IS GREAT IF YOU DONT VALUE YOUR TIME

Even with that caveat I wouldn’t agree.

But there’s something to it.

For me, a decade of Linux user, having been forced to work with a bunch of Windows laptops recently, even the difference between 10 and 11 was palpable. Not only in resource usage but also in just getting around the system, running updates, trying to disable the stock ticker (?WTF?) etc.

autonomous drones

They really thought that sounds like a plus