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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#201

Post by otterley »

cvoss wrote: post #23
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?”

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…

If it comes with good documentation and appropriate tests, does that help?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#202

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

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).

The reason it's common courtesy is out of respect for the reviewer/maintainer's time. You need to let em know to look for the kind of idiotic mistakes LLMs shit out on a routine basis. It's not a "distraction", it's extremely relevant information. On the maintainer's discretion, they may not want to waste their time reviewing it at all, and politely or impolitely ask the contributor to do it again, and use their own brain this time. It also informs them on how seriously to take this contributor in the future, if the work doesn't hold water, or indeed, even if it does, since the next time the contributor runs the LLM lottery the result may be utter bullshit.

Whether it's prose or code, when informed something is entirely or partially AI generated, it completely changes the way I read it. I have to question every part of it now, no matter how intuitive or "no one could get this wrong"ish it might seem. And when I do, I usually find a multitude of minor or major problems. Doesn't matter how "state of the art" the LLM that shat it out was. They're still there. The only thing that ever changed in my experience is that problems become trickier to spot. Because these things are bullshit generators. All they're getting better at is disguising the bullshit.

I'm sure I'll gets lots of responses trying to nitpick my comment apart. "You're holding it wrong", bla bla bla. I really don't care anymore. Don't waste your time. I won't engage with any of it.

I used to think it was undeserved that we programmers called ourselved "engineers" and "architects" even before LLMs. At this point, it's completely farcical.

"Gee, why would I volunteer that my work came from a bullshit generator? How is that relevant to anything?" What a world.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#203

Post by inferiorhuman »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #187
gizmo686 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ef…

We need better social norms about disclosure, but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter). Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the c…

  but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do
  with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter)
AI is a great proxy for how much someone has. If you're writing a PR you're demonstrating some manner of understanding. If you're submitting AI slop you're not.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#204

Post by ryukoposting »

Hamuko wrote: post #142
ineedasername wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Training an AI model is not the same as using an AI model.

Publishing pirated copies of books on libgen isn't the same as downloading pirated copies of books from libgen. Neither is legal.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#205

Post by blurbleblurble »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #203
blurbleblurble wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need better social norms about disclosure, but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter). Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the c…

but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter) AI is a great proxy for how much someone has. If you're writing a PR you're demonstrating some manner of understanding. If you're submitting AI slop you're not.

I've worked with 10x developers who committed a lot of features and a lot of bugs, and who got lots of accolades for all their green squares. They did not use LLM dev tools because those didn't exist then.

If they had used AI, their PRs might have been more understandable / less buggy, and ultimately I would have preferred that.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#206

Post by wizzwizz4 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #66
luma wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also ban StackOverflow and nearly any text book in the field. The reality is that programmers are going to see other programmers code.

"see" and "copy" are two different things. It's fine to look at StackOverflow to understand the solution to a problem. It's not fine to copy and paste from StackOverflow and ignore its license or attribution. Content on StackOverflow is under CC-by-sa, version depends on the date it was submitted: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing . (It's really unfortunate that they didn't pick license compatible with code ;…

CC BY-SA 4.0 is "compatible with code". It is, for example, GPL-compatible (see https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibili...). It's just not designed for code.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#208

Post by ineedasername »

bsder wrote: post #171
ineedasername wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>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.

Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing.

For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re saying you got results that were too good to be AI- that’s a bit “no true Scotsman”, at least without more detail. But implementing an algorithm, even a complex one, is very much something an LLM can do. Algorithms are much better defined and scoped natural language, and LLMs do a reasonable job of translating to languages. An algorithm is a narrow subset of that task type with better defined context and syntax.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#209

Post by Filligree »

bsder wrote: post #171
ineedasername wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

How is that obviously proprietary? Aren't you implicitly assuming that the AI couldn't have written it on its own?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#210

Post by risyachka »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #187
gizmo686 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ef…

We need better social norms about disclosure, but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter). Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the c…

>> but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs"

The only reason one may not want disclosure is if one can’t write anything by themselves, thus they will have to label all code as AI generated and everyone will see their real skill level.

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