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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#171

Post by bsder »

ineedasername wrote: post #72
neilv wrote: post #26

There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not. If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company. But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin…

Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. There’s lots of details to figure, but the genie is out of the bottle. Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative.

If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you.

AI is training on private Github repos and coughing them up. I've had it regurgitate a very well written piece of code to do a particular computational geometry algorithm. It presented perfect, idiomatic Python with perfect tests that caught all the degenerate cases. That was obviously proprietary code--no amount of searching came up with anything even remotely close (it's why I asked the AI, after all).

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#172

Post by moron4hire »

KritVutGu wrote: post #65
cvoss wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter how and where a PR comes from, because reviewers are fallible and finite, so trust enters the equation inevitably. You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from. If trust didn't matter, there wouldn't have been a need for the Linux Kernel team to ban the University of Minnesota for attempting to intentionally smuggle bugs through the PR process…

[flagged]

I think this is an excellent example of how software is different from everything else that is copyright-able. If you look at how GenAI is being applied to "the arts" and how completely destructive it is to the visual mediums, it is clearly a completely different beast to code. "The artists" of visual art don't want AI trained on their work and competing with their work. I completely understand. The point of art is to be a personal interaction between artist and consumer. But, even though I'm quite skeptical of AI code gen on a practical standpoint, it really doesn't feel like the same existential threat.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#173

Post by gizmo686 »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #146
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They genuinely believe their use of chatbots is equivalent to multiple years of production experience in a language. They want to erase that distinction (“democratize”) so they can have the same privileges and status without the work. Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?

That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually wr…

> I've had manually written, well thought through, well conceived, rough around the edges code get called "AI slop" by a colleague (who I very much respect and have a good relationship with) who admittedly hadn't had a chance to thoroughly understand the code yet.

This is the core problem with AI that makes so many people upset. In the old days, if you get a substantial submission, you know a substantial amount of effort went into it. You know that someone at some point had a mental model of what the submission was. Even if they didn't translate that perfectly, you can still try to figure out what they meant and we're thinking. You know the submitter put forth significant effort. That is a real signal that they are both willing and able to do so to address going forward to address issues you raise.

The existence of AI slop fundamentally breaks these assumptions. That is why we need enforced social norms around disclosure.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#174

Post by mattgreenrocks »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #146
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They genuinely believe their use of chatbots is equivalent to multiple years of production experience in a language. They want to erase that distinction (“democratize”) so they can have the same privileges and status without the work. Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?

That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually wr…

I get it. But it’s ultimately up to the maintainer here.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#175

Post by throwawaybob420 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #135
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer amount of entitlement on display by very pro-AI people genuinely boggles the mind.

They genuinely believe their use of chatbots is equivalent to multiple years of production experience in a language. They want to erase that distinction (“democratize”) so they can have the same privileges and status without the work. Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?

Democratize X via boiling our oceans!!

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#176

Post by ivanche »

oceanplexian wrote: post #67
nosignono wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. I think you do care, you are only thinking about the happy path where someone uses a little AI to draft a well constructed PR. There's a lot ways AI can be used to quickly overwhelm a project maintainer.

> I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. Then perhaps the way you contribute, review, and accept code is fundamentally wrong and needs to change with the times. It may be that technologies like Github PRs and other VCS patterns are literally obsolete. We've done this before throughout many cycles of technology, and these are the questions we need to ask ourselves as engineers, not sti…

You're free to invent a better way, popularize it and become a millionaire.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#177

Post by eschaton »

koolba wrote: post #56
cvoss wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter how and where a PR comes from, because reviewers are fallible and finite, so trust enters the equation inevitably. You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from. If trust didn't matter, there wouldn't have been a need for the Linux Kernel team to ban the University of Minnesota for attempting to intentionally smuggle bugs through the PR process…

> You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from. No you don’t. You can’t outsource trust determinations. Especially to the people you claim not to trust! You make the judgement call by looking at the code and your known history of the contributor. Nobody cares if contributors use an LLM or a magnetic needle to generate code. They care if bad code gets introduc…

You’re completely incorrect. People care a lot about where code came from. They need to be able to trust that code you’re contributing was not copied from a project under AGPLv3, if the project you’re contributing to is under a different license.

Stop trying to equate LLM-generated code with indexing-based autocomplete. They’re not the same thing at all: LLM-generated code is equivalent to code copied off Stack Overflow, which is also something you’d better not be attempting to fraudulently pass off as your own work.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#178

Post by eks391 »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #96
bootsmann wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both sides will use AI and it will ultimately increase economic productivity. Citation needed, I don’t think the printing press and gpt are in any way comparable.

The mental gymnastics the parent poster went through to equate an LLM to the printing press in this sense are mind-boggling.

Ironically, I thought your parent commenter had to go through mental gymnastics to say that their parents analogy of the printing press isn't applicable to an LLM. Neither you nor your parent gave me any satisfactory reasons why they aren't similar, just your mental superiority as proof that oceanplexian must be wrong.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#179

Post by tick_tock_tick »

neilv wrote: post #90
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not. I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are. Luckily everyone is for the most part just ignoring them and the legal system is working well and not allowing them an inch to stop progress.

> I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are. Why do you think that about people who disagree with you? You're responding directly to someone who's said they think there's issues, and not pretending. Do you think they're lying? Did you not read what they said? And AFAICT a lot of other people think similarly to me. The perverse incentives t…

No, I think they have a monetary incentive they have failed to disclose or a limited at best understanding of basic copyright law.

They can have a moral view that AI is "stealing" but they are claiming there is actually a legal issue at play.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#180

Post by eschaton »

armchairhacker wrote: post #144
Waterluvian wrote: post #10

I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

Agreed. As someone who uses AI (completion and Claude Code), I'll disclose whenever asked. But I disagree that it's "common courtesy" when not explicitly asked; since many people (including myself) don't mind and probably assume some AI, and it adds distraction (another useless small indicator; vaguely like dependabot, in that it steals my attention but ultimately I don't care).

It’s not just common courtesy to disclose, it’s outright fraud not to disclose.
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