LibrePlanet: Conference/2024/BOF

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions for LP2024

Interested in putting together a BoF? Other plans or ideas for a social event? This is your place to do all that and more!

Birds of a Feather sessions are a time for people to get together around a specific topic or identity, either to focus on conversations, come up with new ideas, or just spend time socializing.

Use the following information to describe your BoF. Anyone can sign up to the event by adding their name to the attendee's list. We encourage you to try by yourself to add your session below, but if you run into any trouble feel free to email campaigns@fsf.org and we'll post it on the site and help direct people to your event!

Template

Title

Theme/Topic

Organizer(s)

Description

Notes

Attendees

Location TBC

2024 Proposals

Free Software Fun

Theme/Topic Free software games

Organizer(s) Zachary Sarver

Description Let's play and discuss some free software games together! The world of free software has plenty of fun on offer and interesting topics to discuss. We can discuss the topic of originality (or, what are the best games that aren't clones?), how to push free software forward, and the numerous free software engine reimplementations. Bring your favorite device, and maybe we can get in a few games of glDoom or Wesnoth.

Notes

Attendees

Location TBC

AI and how to think about it

Theme/Topic: How do we decide how to judge AI in terms of software freedom?

Organizer(s): Ciarán O'Riordan

Description: For people to be treated well in a society which includes software, there are four essential freedoms that software must come with. But an AI system is different to a software system in that the source code is only a tiny part of the system. If we simply check the software part for the four freedoms, we might conclude that an AI system comes with the essential freedoms, but we would not get the benefits that we expect from society having the four freedoms. A second option would be that we apply the four freedoms test to the entire AI system (software + data). Most AI systems today would fail that test, the same way most software systems failed the four freedoms text back in the 1980s. Writing free software to replace non-free software was a huge task, but it was possible, and we have made a lot of progress on this. However, replacing non-free AI training data with free AI training data may be so difficult that it's impossible. One example is large language models. Data scraped from a million websites by professional writers might currently be the input for a medium-quality large language model. There's no way we can create a parallel internet with a similar corpus of a million websites by professional writers. A second example is medical systems. If the necessary training data includes personal or sensitive data, we might find it is impossible to accumulate a sufficient amount of freely-distributable, freely-modifiable medical data. (In both cases, creating an AI system would be possible, either using public domain texts from 100 years ago or using a limited archive of old or theoretical medical data, but neither would suffice to produce a medium-quality AI system for either task.)

Notes: So, anyone who agrees that the above issue is a problem, let's meet up and discuss it. (If you think the above is not an issue, maybe that can be discussed in a BoF about whether AI exists or whether AI systems are different to software systems. Those are great questions and I'd probably join those BoFs if someone proposes such.)

Attendees:

Location TBC

This page was a featured resource in December 2023.