Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] SubmittingPatches: add section about AI

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2025 21:37:31 +0000

On 2025-10-01 at 14:02:50, Christian Couder wrote:
> +[[ai]]
> +=== Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
> +
> +The Developer's Certificate of Origin requires contributors to certify
> +that they know the origin of their contributions to the project and
> +that they have the right to submit it under the project's license.
> +It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
> +significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools.

Perhaps we'd like to write this:

  It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
  significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools,
  so we cannot accept this content in our project.

If we're going to have a policy, we need to be direct about it and not
let people draw their own conclusions.  Many people don't have English
as a first language and we don't want people trying to language lawyer.

We could say something like this:

  Please do not sign off your work if you’re using an LLM to contribute
  unless you have included copyright and license information for all the
  code used in that LLM.

This allows the possibility that, say, Google trains an LLM entirely on
their own code, such that there is only one copyright holder and they
can license it as they see fit.  I don't think we _need_ to consider
that case if we don't want to allow that (say, for code quality
reasons), but we could if we wanted to.

> +Another issue with AI generated content is that AIs still often
> +hallucinate or just produce bad code, commit messages, documentation
> +or output, even when you point out their mistakes.
> +
> +To avoid these issues, we will reject anything that looks AI
> +generated, that sounds overly formal or bloated, that looks like AI
> +slop, that looks good on the surface but makes no sense, or that
> +senders don’t understand or cannot explain.

I've definitely seen this.  LLMs also typically do not write nice,
logical, bisectable commits, which I personally dislike as a reviewer.

> +We strongly recommend using AI tools carefully and responsibly.

I think this is maybe not definitive enough.  If we don't believe it's
possible to sign-off when code is generated using LLMs, then we should
say definitively, "Contributors may not use AI to write contributions to
Git," or something similarly clear.

Right now, this sounds too ambiguous and it might allow someone to write
substantial code that they think is of good quality using an LLM because
in their view that's careful and responsible, when we don't think that
users can sign off on that and therefore that's not possible.  Telling
people to use tools "carefully and responsibly" is like telling people
to drive "a reasonable and prudent speed" without further qualification
and then being surprised when they go 200 km/hr down the road.

I'd like to see the language be more like our code of conduct in that it
is broad and covers a wide variety of behaviour but also explicitly
states what is and is not acceptable to avoid ambiguity, confusion, or
argument.

> +Contributors would often benefit more from AI by using it to guide and
> +help them step by step towards producing a solution by themselves
> +rather than by asking for a full solution that they would then mostly
> +copy-paste. They can also use AI to help with debugging, or with
> +checking for obvious mistakes, things that can be improved, things
> +that don’t match our style, guidelines or our feedback, before sending
> +it to us.

This kind of use I feel is less objectionable.  I think it might be
acceptable to use an LLM as a guide, a linter, or a first-pass code
review.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA