Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 482 posts

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#361

Post by hagbarth »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #222
andruby wrote: post #108

> 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 I really appreciate this point from mitchellh. Giving thoughtful constructive feedback to help a junior developer improve is a gift. Yet it would be a waste of time if the PR submitter is just going to pass it to an AI without learning from it.

Junior developers are entering a workforce where they will never not be using AI

They will still need to learn to recognise if the output from AI is good or not.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#362

Post by rane »

jeremyjh wrote: post #242
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.

Using AI to generate code in a PR does not necessarily mean however that the user has not taken time to understand the changes and is not willing to learn. There are AI users who generate whole files without understanding the contents, and then there are AI users who generate the exact same files but have known in advance what they want, and merely use AI as a tool to save typing.

The intention here seems to be to filter out low quality submissions for which the only purpose is to only pimp Github resume for having contributions in highly starred repo. Not sure if the people doing that will be disclosing use of AI anyway.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#363

Post by jeffrallen »

So the nice thing about open source is you get to make your own rules. But then you need to accept the consequences.

For example, the GNU project has certain norms, and those dissuade a lot of people from contributing (e.g. I prefer working on projects with simpler, non-viral licenses). The limited volunteer labor pool is allocated according to people's interests towards other projects, and maybe GNU projects suffer for less attention on them.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#364

Post by rane »

fzeroracer wrote: post #261
infotainment wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed -- this requirement feels less like an actually useful requirement and more a silly and performative one, which is trying to make some kind of commentary on AI use as a whole.

Spending at minimum five minutes would tell you why maintainers are implementing this change. It's because people using LLMs are spamming open source repos with fake issues, incredibly low quality but high effort to review PRs and shutting down the active communication process between reviewer and reviewee by not even understanding their own code.

Why would these people disclose their use of AI? These are not responsible and thoughful users of AI. The slop producers won't disclose, and the responsible users who produce high quality PRs with AI will get the "AI slop" label. At this point, why even disclose if the AI-assisted high-quality PR is indistinguishable from having been manually written (which it should be)? No point.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#365

Post by mellosouls »

This is actually a well worded, reasonable suggestion that rightly draws attention to the lack of review and informed oversight of AI-assisted contributions in some cases.

It's ironically in rather a contrast in tone to some of the anti-AI comments in the thread here that seem to be responding to tired arguments from three years ago rather than the OP linked.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#366

Post by account42 »

Borealid wrote: post #304
jedbrown wrote: post #286

Provenance matters. An LLM cannot certify a Developer Certificate of Origin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi... ) and a developer of integrity cannot certify the DCO for code emitted by an LLM, certainly not an LLM trained on code of unknown provenance. It is well-known that LLMs sometimes produce verbatim or near-verbatim copies of their training data, most of which cannot be used witho…

An LLM can be used for a clean room design so long as all (ALL) of its training data is in the clean room (and consequently does not contain the copyrighted work being reverse engineered). An LLM trained on the Internet-at-large is also presumably suitable for a clean room design if it can be shown that its training completed prior to the existence of the work being duplicated, and thus could not have been contaminat…

> An LLM trained on the Internet-at-large is also presumably suitable for a clean room design if it can be shown that its training completed prior to the existence of the work being duplicated, and thus could not have been contaminated.

This is assuming that you are only concerned with a particular work when you need to be sure that you are not copying any work that might be copyrighted without making sure to have a valid license that you are abiding by.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#367

Post by felipeerias »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55
thallavajhula wrote: post #27

I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences. I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to hu…

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI? I was original pr…

At the moment, AI tools are particularly useful for people who feel comfortable browsing through large amounts of text, intuitively nudging the machine this way and that until arriving at a valuable outcome.

However, that way of working can be exasperating for those who prefer a more deterministic approach, and who may feel frustrated by the sheer amount of slightly incorrect stuff being generated by the machine.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#369

Post by camgunz »

raggi wrote: post #294
jedbrown wrote: post #286

Provenance matters. An LLM cannot certify a Developer Certificate of Origin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi... ) and a developer of integrity cannot certify the DCO for code emitted by an LLM, certainly not an LLM trained on code of unknown provenance. It is well-known that LLMs sometimes produce verbatim or near-verbatim copies of their training data, most of which cannot be used witho…

For a large LLM I think the science in the end will demonstrate that verbatim reproduction is not coming from verbatim recording, as the structure really isn’t setup that way in the models under question here. This is similar to the ruling by Alsup in the Anthropic books case that the training is “exceedingly transformative”. I would expect a reinterpretation or disagreement on this front from another case to be both…

> For a large LLM I think the science in the end will demonstrate that verbatim reproduction is not coming from verbatim recording

We don't need all this (seemingly pretty good) analysis. We already know what everyone thinks: no relevant AI company has had their codebase or other IP scraped by AI bots they don't control, and there's no way they'd allow that to happen, because they don't want an AI bot they don't control to reproduce their IP without constraint. But they'll turn right around and be like, "for the sake of the future, we have to ingest all data... except no one can ingest our data, of course". :rolleyes:

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#370

Post by bootsmann »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #181
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.

GPT and compilers are though.

Compilers don’t randomly fail to compile code that is too difficult for them to understand. Llvm makes sure that I never have to learn assembly, gpt doesn’t guarantee at all that I don’t have to learn to code.
Post reply on HN