Should darktable remain AI-free?

Masterpiga · April 9, 2026, 3:12pm

I second this feeling, but I think that the principle is being applied very selectively here, and I find this bias hard to digest.

Are you stopping using Linux, or macOS, or Firefox, or Chrome, or open-SSH, or Rust, or Python because they are sponsored by the evil companies?

When you go to the grocery or the hardware store, do you investigate how every single item is produced, or how the workers involved (from the field and the factory to the retail shop) are treated?

Let’s just focus on the local workers, the ones that live in your country whose living conditions are comparable to yours.

Do you know how well the lorry drivers that move the stocks between warehouses or deliver your goods to the shops are treated?

And what about warehouse workers? Do you not buy any product that passed through a warehouse where workers are underpaid or exploited?

And what about the hardware store itself. Are the workers protected? Is their job safe? Do they get proper retirement contributions? Is their salary above or below average?

And the cleaning personnel in the shop. Are they getting above average salary, or are they getting market-value salary for their service? Are they treated respectfully by their boss?

Instead of focusing on the problems near us, and doing something concrete about it, we decide to focus on something so very remote and abstract, like Meta using this cheap labor. This makes us feel good, because we are taking an ethical stance, and because we are bashing an evil and rich company that we dislike. And at no cost, because there is really nothing to lose, right?

It’s not that I don’t share the views that have been expressed in this thread about fairness and proper compensation, and a better world and what not. It’s just that I don’t see how it is possible, concretely, to abide by these ideals coherently and consistently and still be able to have some kind of normal and functional life in a complex society as the one that we live in.

Choosing to apply these principles only in selected cases, so that one can feel good about it without having to pay a price for it, strikes me as a cheap and hypocritical way of cleansing one’s conscience.

paperdigits · April 9, 2026, 3:35pm

@Masterpiga I hope that your continual goal post moving in this thread is a sign that you might actually be starting to give some critical thought to what people with opposing opinions think about this.

Just so we’re clear, the goal post moving is:

Is this model ethical (original point)
How does using the model that already exist harm end users?
Darktable is choosing freedom for its end users
Relativism makes this OK (e.g. there are larger problems closer to you)
You all are hypocrites (Choosing to apply these principles only in selected cases, so that one can feel good about it without having to pay a price for it, strikes me as a cheap and hypocritical way of cleansing one’s conscience.)

Otherwise, your posts here are pretty hard to swallow.

Anyway, to go all the way for maximum irony, I put some of your questions from earlier posts directly into google gemini, and the results were pretty decent. I obviously won’t post that here, as it violates my own rule

Maybe some reading around the idea of the “poverty trap” would help answer some of the questions you posed, but otherwise you don’t seem open to changing your view.

Finally, if darktable is “choosing to give end users choice because the devs love freedom” then why not integrate nano banana and other gen AI? Give your users the freedom to choose… but it is already been said by the maintainer that it won’t happen… why? (This is a rhetorical question, please don’t answer it). By including SAM, the project has implicitly endorsed it and that sends a signal to the users.

Masterpiga · April 9, 2026, 4:09pm

Thanks for the credit, but are you sure that I have been the one moving the goal posts? Or have I been responding to the ever changing arguments of those who want to find a problem with the inclusion of these models?

I appear to be in good company

g-man · April 9, 2026, 4:19pm

Some of the camera components are manufactured using low cost labor. Some are likely assembled in low labor areas like the iPhones (I recall the nets around the building). Should we avoid buying a Fuji GFX, Canon R6M3, Nikon Z6 for ethical reasons? Are we endorsing those “unethical” cameras by supporting them with rawspeed?

paperdigits · April 9, 2026, 4:23pm

ok well if we’re resorting to grade school “YOU TOO” while you seemingly have not bother to read or investigate any of the links or concepts previously provided, then I’ll just stop here.

You can continue to be the libertarian, capitalist hero that developing nations obviously need! Yay for you.

Steven_Adler1 · April 9, 2026, 5:02pm

Ethical lapses in business generally are not our problem. Job security in developing nations is also not our problem. Our problem is deciding how to label the ML models that will be included in darktable with unknown training data provenance that could be indicative (but unproven) of ethical problems. I write this and acknowledge I have moved my own goal post and do so because this wonderful dialog has helped me see that it will be very rare instances in which we ever know fully where the damn data came from and how it was collected. Best we can do probably is make our best guess and decide which models get rejected and how the ambiguous ones get labeled to allow conscientious users to make their own decisions.

bastibe · April 9, 2026, 5:20pm

Yeah, pedestrians carry a distinct disadvantage in direct combat with vehicles.

Today we stayed in Konstanz, in southern Germany, on ou bike trip with the kids. The city has built an amazing infrastructure of bike highways into and out of town that are entirely separate from regular roads. Even for my German cyclist sensibilities, I can’t remember seeing this amount of effort put into making a city bikeable. No doubt this reduces fatal traffic accidents as well.

As for the rest of the discussion, I am genuinely interested in how the more ethically focused among us deal with modern life and hardware. Linux is probably a given, but are there even halfway decent options for buying computer hardware? What phone options exist? What about cameras, cars, food? Do you expend the same energy in these areas as you do in software? As I said, I intend no snark or jest, but am genuinely interested how you deal with stuff.

Personally, I buy organic where convenient, have a Fairphone, solar panels, don’t have a car; but do buy Apple computers, go on faraway vacations, still eat meat… And feel bad doing so.

And I wonder about these bad feelings, too. It feels like my powers as a consumer are a drop in the bucket, while real change would require different policies and incentives. It feels like consumer shaming is just the latest dark pattern in “greenwashing” corporate greed. Much easier to shame consumers in a social media campaign than change internal processes to improve worker conditions or find less exploitative sources for materials

Steven_Adler1 · April 9, 2026, 5:26pm

Apple has never asked me for my input on iPhone or Mac development and the ethics involved. My voice is only to choose my consumption patterns and my information about the products I buy is limited. That limitation would have applied here to darktable without the information provided by @paperdigits. Now that I am informed, I can be lazy and disregard the information to continue consuming darktable content or I can stand up against unethical behavior because someone gave me the choice. Everyone should make their own choices. I made mine.

Yogansh_Bhatt · April 9, 2026, 5:43pm

After a certain point, which is quite far above my 667th message (which is also the end of the native ISO on my pixel’s GNK sensor iirc), the thread started to drift away from the major points of concerns and the actual Debate about the inclusion of certain category of models and in general *the type of Ai * we would like DT to include as part of the project in any way.

I don’t like how people from different lands are stuck in this virtual French Revolution which seems so forced that it is almost humorous at this point. Oh and The French Revolution sounds like the perfect thing to compare @Masterpiga arguments!
Why? because from what little I have read It is connected to the many articles linked by mica and the summarization that @martinus did above.

Now from my perspective @Masterpiga you almost sound like the person who would advocate for the first estate…or at least the second .

Let me also add this - The French revolution fixed a lot things such as inequality when it comes to law and taxes or other stuff but it didn’t magically remove the economic scenario of the time because rich stayed rich and poor were devoid of any land and resources although one would argue that is the nature of the world.

My point is Just because French Revolution didn’t solve the misery of the common folk entirely doesn’t mean it was unnecessary

translating that to the current arguments

The SAM models by META are not in 100% clear hence including such an opaque model risks -

Normalization of the distribution of similar opaque models/tools
Promotion of of worse practices (You seem to be chill about this one which is the issue)
Offering a model which may be unethical (and from whatever I have seen almost seems to be the case and even if it isn’t we should promote transparency from the start) and that signals something we wouldn’t want DT to show to it’s users.
Unwanted questions about trust and honesty (3rd point) because it puts META and DT in the same space (you can call it exaggeration but the user is just as guilty as the progenitor if they have been educated about it already )

and I can add a few more but aren’t these enough?

Either provide a way how you can go past these 4 before fighting another Revolution here. It is exhausting without using an LLM and I hope you are just as exhausted as me .

Yogansh_Bhatt · April 9, 2026, 5:44pm

dammit I am past the analog range already…smh

paperdigits · April 9, 2026, 5:48pm

I’ve tried to optimized as much as reasonably possible, given contraints of mostly budget.

Computer hardware: my home lab is all used equipment. I got a framework laptop because I felt like I could decrease ewaste. I have a fairphone for the same reason, and have replaced bateries twice already, so that saves two phones that I would’ve had otherwise.

Car: used and best technology at the time, hybred gas/battery. will drive it until it is no longer fit for purpose, as that seems to be the most ecologically sound thing i can do.

I have saved up enough now to get solar on my house, and I’m very exited to have solar + batteries soon.

Food is harder in the US, and in the last few years has become really expensive. Try and eat fresh stuff for my own health, look for deals on organic, but its mostly out of reach for every day eating. Look for more local stuff when I can afford it.

I don’t really see it as “consumer shaming” but rather people that care trying to do whatever is possible to make change on any scale, even if its a drop in the bucket, eventually those drops will fill a bucket (this analogy is getting weird ). The choices aren’t binary, there are many shades of gray, and the more you can shade towards something good, I think the better off we all are. I understand that I can’t take action for every single thing, but I try to do what I can.

If I see an opportunity where I can possibly effect change in a thing, especially a thing I care about, then I go for it, which I hope explains my actions and opinions here.

So like yes, broad policy change would be great. I vote that way. But I try and do the smaller things to, and, maybe this is dumb, but the little things count too.

ggbutcher · April 9, 2026, 5:55pm

That is quite cool. Albuquerque, New Mexico, to my recall had an extensive bike thoroughfare system, but probably not as dense.

Best bike-friendly place I’ve been was Kwajalein Island. There, bikes had the right-of-way, in all cases. Individuals could not have cars; there were a few government-owned special-use vehicles running around, but they gave way to any bike, any situation. Island was only 2 miles by 1/2 mile, so all trips were very easy bike rides. There was a bit of ‘bike culture’ in the fray; for instance, one thing to do with your bike was to get a 2-foot-or-so length of pipe, mount your handlebars to it upside-down so they were comfortable to lean on, stick it through the handlebar mount and, ta-da, ‘Kwaj Bike’. Here’s a good example:

Public Domain, see DVIDS - Copyright Information

And, the predominant pace is, how slow can you go without tipping over…

hatsnp · April 9, 2026, 6:04pm

I don’t think we as consumers can do much really. We can avoid obvious harmful practices like over consumption of anything, fast fashion, red meat or other products or activities with a high pollution footprint, etc. After that I believe that the bigger impacts have to come from legislation.

I have started avoiding poly only clothing which is in direct contact with skin. I only really buy poly in jackets or as a mix in my favorite new inner shirts which are 70% merino, 30% poly.

I want to quit red meat in the following years, not just for the pollution, which can be debated and is not very binary depending on your source, but more because of animal suffering. As I become more sensible and research these things I start to feel more for these animals that we eat every day.

I don’t think co2 reduction is gonna come from consumers but by legislation and industry wide practices. I don’t believe computer or camera hardware has a serious impact. More co2 and methane have probably been released in a single refinery attack in this stupid war than was used for every camera and lens combined produced in the last 25 years. That said I try to have a responsible consumption and not overbuy things I don’t need. I avoid single use plastics too and other obvious things like that.

Yogansh_Bhatt · April 9, 2026, 6:06pm

We Just bought wheat for the year directly from local farmers, the vegetable and other things are also similarly sourced and because I live in a Village and the area of the state is also not very developed in comparison to the nearest cities so everything is naturally in order.

I got myself a pixel 8 pro because amongst all the devices I could get used at the time for my use case was this and I am sure this will last me at least till 2029 .

Honestly if Mica wouldn’t have mentioned how the model came to being then I wouldn’t have taken such a strong stance. As @Steven_Adler1 said I can only chose one of the two - I can be lazy and disregard the information or I can sand up against unethical behaviour because someone gave me the choice.

This is the same as my initial post which talked about desensitization and normalization of such practices. We are surrounded by such choices yet make the choices we shouldn’t really make if we are to traverse the righteous path, knowingly or unknowingly. It seems too late but I cannot justify my future choices based on current sad reality and that’s mostly it.

I will probably take note from people who want to build a better world for everyone around us and everyone else to come after us because I myself am relatively young and have seen and suffered from the choices others made in the past that affect me the future generation. Maybe not related to this topic but this leads me to the conclusion that closing my eyes won’t save me from oncoming avalanche. The least I can do is survive and tell everybody what was the cause and what not to do to cause another avalanche when trekking along the same trail (I am no trekker but hopefully that will change soon).

priort · April 9, 2026, 7:01pm

I came across this today

mino · April 9, 2026, 7:08pm

lol

Also: It impresses me how far off the rails this thread has come.

Yogansh_Bhatt · April 9, 2026, 7:33pm

yes I tried to hide it in those long paragraphs but this is essentially part of the worry. I myself do not hate the idea of using a model to denoise my images if it can actually do an acceptable job for me and I can potentially run all my raw videos through it but people will go hard just for the fact dt uses any sort of ai and if we don’t put some safeguards in place then it can get messier.
It’s just a premonition at this point and I would love to be wrong here.

In an ideal world none of this is necessary but sadly people will go berserk… I can only decide for myself and use what I find worth it.

MStraeten · April 9, 2026, 7:51pm

FOSS is fundamentally about sharing - and it is individuals who do the sharing: developers, documentation writers, tutorial authors…
darktable as such offers nothing; its contributors decide what they are willing to give.

Every contributor has the right to stop at any time, for any reason. No community is owed an explanation, and no community has the standing to demand that an individual’s reasoning meet their approval. When someone concludes that a project is heading in the wrong direction and withdraws, that decision deserves respect - not prolonged debate about their motives.
The ethical principles that guide an individual’s decisions are deeply personal - and precisely for that reason, beyond the reach of collective debate. They are not positions to be negotiated, challenged, or overruled by a community. To treat them as such is not only beside the point; it is a failure of basic respect.
So rather than complaining: acknowledge the work that has been done, be grateful for what you are free to use, and ask yourself what you are prepared to contribute.

Steven_Adler1 · April 9, 2026, 8:45pm

AI is here. It is in darktable. Like it or not, it changes everything.

Bernhard_Vogler · April 9, 2026, 8:54pm