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[[!meta title="Meetup/panel about LLMs?"]]
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# [Panel] Emacs, LLMs, and Free Software: Access, Agency, and Accountability
Participants:
**Panel members are being finalized**
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The topic of AI (as a broad concept) and its flagship technology -
LLMs - is rather controversial. Some of us enthusiastically accept the
technology and its potential to change lives for the better; some are
more cautious, or outright question the long-term consequences for
individuals, countries, and the whole world; raise ethical concerns,
or point to high energy consumption (especially concentrated in USA).
However, there is no doubt that Emacs (and the whole world) cannot
ignore the topic.
The Emacs community already has both proponents and opponents of
the LLMs and a number of LLM integrations have appeared over the
last few years. Here, we have brought a number of Emacs users
with very different views about AI together, to make the range of
positions explicit and to explore how Emacs and its community can
support different approaches without fracturing.
We tried our best to lay out the questions constructively, and to
avoid the general topics that have already been beaten to death
in online discussions across the web. We ask both the panel
participants and the EmacsConf audience to approach the
discussion the same way: with the goal of understanding each
other's positions and finding ways for different choices to
coexist.
P.S. There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels :)
Questions:
1. If you were to imagine an ideal AI software you would use with
Emacs, how would it look like? How would it **not** look like? What
freedoms it would need to have? Feel free to answer anything, not
limiting yourself to current LLM architectures.
2. What is the most useful application of LLMs with Emacs for you
personally? If you are not using LLMs, imagine that there is an
ideal AI or complex automation software you would be willing to use
and come up with such application.
3. What is the most critical use case in your Emacs workflows where
you would **avoid** using AI?
4. Imagine that there is an LLM-generated code submitted to Emacs that
implements long-awaited feature (for example, multi-threading
support in Emacs or time zone support in Org). As a maintainer,
under what conditions, if any, would you accept LLM-generated code,
and what would need to change for you to accept it? As a user,
would you be willing to use such a new feature? You can answer as
a maintainer, user, or both.
5. What is one thing the Emacs community should build, document, or
support (for newcomers or otherwise) around LLMs/AI in the next
year? And one thing it should decline to do?
Related:
<https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacsconf-org/2026-08/msg00007.html>
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