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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#241

Post by david_allison »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #194
tsimionescu wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a false equivalence. You can teach a beginner to become an intermediate (and later a master, if they stick to it). You can't teach an LLM to be better. Every piece of feedback you give to an LLM is like screaming into the void - it wastes your time, and doesn't change the LLM one iota.

"Every piece of feedback you give to an LLM is like screaming into the void - it wastes your time, and doesn't change the LLM one iota." I think you just haven't gotten the hang of it yet, which is fine... the tooling is very immature and hard to get consistent results with. But this isn't a given. Some people do get good, steerable LLM coding setups.

As a maintainer, if you're dealing with a contributor who's sending in AI slop, you have no opportunity to prompt the LLM.

The PR effectively ends up being an extremely high-latency conversation with an LLM, via another human who doesn't have the full context/understanding of the problem.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#242

Post by jeremyjh »

epolanski wrote: post #77

This isn't an AI problem this is a human one. Blaming it on the tool, and not the person's misusing it trying to get his name on a big os project, is like blaming the new automatic in the kitchen and not the chef for getting a raw pizza on the table.

OP is not blaming the AI - did you read the post? AI does enable shitty humans to open PRs with code they have no comprehension of, wasting precious time donated by a skilled maintainer. That is a new thing that wasn’t possible without AI.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#243

Post by ineedasername »

showcaseearth wrote: post #158
ineedasername wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I personally can’t imagine why someone would want to hide the fact they used AI. Because of the perception that anything touched by AI must be uncreative slop made without effort. In the case of this article, why else are they asking for disclosure if not to filter and dismiss such contributions?

Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to wo…

>did you actually read the post?

Yes.

>but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't

This is very much in line with my comment about doing it to filter and dismiss. The author didn't say "So I can reach out and see if their clear eagerness to contribute extends to learning to code in more detail".

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#244

Post by bigyabai »

eschaton wrote: post #186
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.

Some courts at some levels. It’s by no means settled law.

Most licensed software is unsettled law, if we're being that pedantic.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#245

Post by asdff »

Filligree wrote: post #220
philjohn wrote: post #54

I like the pattern of including each prompt used to make a given PR, yes, I know that LLM's aren't deterministic, but it also gives context of the steps required to get to the end state.

It's ridiculous and impractical, honestly. A single AI-generated PR would likely involve at least 10-20 prompts, interspersed with testing, manual edits to context / guideline files without which those prompts don't have the same effect, manual coding, and more. A screen recording would do better.

Is there really no logging capability with these tools that would track all of that prompting/testing/editing/inputting?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#246

Post by otterley »

mattbee wrote: post #234
otterley wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you started with good documentation that you personally wrote, you gave that to the agent, and you verified the tests were appropriate and passed?

I'd extrapolate that the OP's view would be: you've still put in less effort, so your PR is less worthy of his attention than someone who'd done the same without using LLMs. That's a pretty nice offer from one of the most famous and accomplished free software maintainers in the world. He's promising not to take a short-cut reviewing your PR, in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.

> in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.

This “short cut” language suggests that the quality of the submission is going to be objectively worse by way of its provenance.

Yet, can one reliably distinguish working and tested code generated by a person vs a machine? We’re well past passing Turing tests at this point.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#247

Post by jakelazaroff »

rowanG077 wrote: post #215
bsder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That seems a real stretch. GPT 5 just invented new math for reference. What you are saying would be equivalent to saying that this math was obviously in some paper that mathematician did not know about. Maybe true, but it's a far reach.

This would be the first time ever that an LLM has discovered new knowledge, but the far reach is that the information does appear in the training data?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#248

Post by eru »

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.

> 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.

Well, AI can perhaps solve the problem it created here: generated IP with AI is much cheaper than with humans, so it will be viable even at lower payoffs.

Less cynical: you can use trade secrets to protect your IP. You can host your software and only let customers interact with it remotely, like what Google (mostly) does.

Of course, this is a very software-centric view. You can't 'protect' eg books or music in this way.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#249

Post by ants_everywhere »

latexr wrote: post #232
ants_everywhere wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't disclose the use of - books - search engines - stack overflow - talking to a coworker then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI. Generally speaking, when someone uses the word "slop" when talking about AI it's a signal to me that they've been sucked into a culture war and to discount what they say about AI. It's of course the maintainer's right to take part in a culture war, but…

> then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI. It’s explained right there in the PR: > The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don'…

[flagged]

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#250

Post by oceanplexian »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #87
oceanplexian wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why it's incorrect? And what would be the new way? AI to review the changes of AI?

If machines can iterate faster than humans, we'll need machines to do the reviewing; that means the testing/QA will be done perhaps by machines which will operate on a spec similar to what Amazon is doing with Kilo.

Before PR's existed we passed around code changes via email. Before containers we installed software on bare metal servers. And before search engines we used message boards. It's not unfathomable that the whole idea of how we contribute and collaborate changes as well. Actually that is likely going to be the /least/ shocking thing in the next few years if acceleration happens (i.e. The entire OS is an LLM that renders pixels, for example)

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