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

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:32:07 -0700

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> I do not have strong preference either way.  Even if the wording is
> firm, it is really up to each contributor to honor the guideline and
> be honest with us.  You may see autocorrection in your editor fix a
> typo for you, and more advanced tools may offer to rewrite what you
> wrote, whether it is prose or code.  It is very plausible that,
> especially for simple fixes, the result may be what the contributor
> would have arrived on their own anyway, and in such a case, even the
> contributor would not even know how much came from "AI" or simple
> dictionary, or if that AI learned with things you should not have
> seen.
>
> So, I do not think it makes too big a difference in practice whether
> we adopt the QEMU with minimum rewrite, or the version you posted.
> As the one you sent is in line with what we give applicants of our
> mentoring programs, and it was read over by our SFC lawyer, I'd
> prefer to keep the version I already have in my tree.  Not moving on
> either, I think, is worse than adopting either in this case.

Taking time to discuss before deciding on an important issue is one
thing, but waiting for more input to happen and not moving in either
direction is worse than picking one and move on.  As I said above, I
do not quite see material difference between either one in practice.

I guess it is time to make an executive decision to merge it down to
'next'.  We can still tweak the language if we want, but it is more
important to have a written policy to reject materials of unknown
origin (whether it came from generative AI or not) than not having
one while we wish to be able to pick the best policy, waiting for a
better argument to come from somewhere.

As to Elijah's concern about grandfathering, I do not think it has
much practical benefit to make such a declaration.  If it turns out
that older "contributions" had added something we shouldn't have,
regardless of how it was generated (either from generative AI or a
human contributor typing while unconciously recalling what they saw
elsewhere), we may need to revert it anyway, so we will deal with it
when it becomes an issue.