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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#431

Post by rerdavies »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #247
rowanG077 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://medium.com/@deshmukhpratik931/the-matrix-multiplicat...

And it's not an accident that significant percentage (40%?) of all papers being published in top journals involve application of AIs.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#432

Post by mock-possum »

bgwalter wrote: post #46

I still do not understand how one can integrate "AI" code into a project with a license at all. "AI" code is not copyrightable, "AI" cannot sign a contributor agreement. So if the code is integrated, the license of the project lies about parts of the code.

“AI” can’t, but the person running the tool can.

The contributor is the human that chose to run the LLM, not the “AI” itself - so the real question is, why isn’t the human’s code copyrightable, and why can’t the human sign a contributor agreement?

Besides, this stuff is not what the author is concerned about:

> I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code … 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't need to put in this effort.

They want to coach aspiring contributors based on code they’ve written themselves, not based on how they prompt their AI.

It’s a matter of how they enjoy spending their time.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#433

Post by rerdavies »

thombles wrote: post #302
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Putting aside the notion that a monetary incentive is invalid for some reason, there are also plenty of open source authors who are pretty unimpressed that they only ask for attribution and even that's being laundered away via weights. If their licence isn't being respected that's certainly a legal issue.

Pretty weird motivation for writing open source software. Just saying.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#434

Post by adastra22 »

jerf wrote: post #416
adastra22 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but: (1) The process of creating "a very, very precise and detailed understanding of the actual problem" is something AI is really good at, when partnered with a human. My use of AI tools got immensely better when I figured out that I should be prompting the AI to turn my vague short request into a detailed prompt, and then I spend a few iteration cycles fixing up before asking the agent to do it. (2) The other…

The information theoretic barrier is in the information content of your prompt, not the ability of the AI to expand it. But then I suppose I should learn from my own experiences and not try to make information theoretic arguments on HN, since it is in that most terrible state where everyone thinks they understand it because they use "bits" all the time, but in fact the average HN denizen knows less than nothing about…

I have a CS theory background. If by prompt you mean the full context provided, then there isn’t an effective limit. Claude now has 1M token context windows. You are not going to fill that with just a task specification. You could easily fill it in a large repo with the accumulated design history and total codebase. However this is also largely static, and could be used for fine-tuning. With fine tuning you’re back to a 1M token task specification for the unique variation of this prompt, and recent changes. You are not going to easily fill that.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#435

Post by rerdavies »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #280
ants_everywhere wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirement is explicitly > If you are using *any kind of AI assistance* to contribute to Ghostty, it must be disclosed in the pull request. This is sufficiently confusing that someone is asking if this applies to tab completion. They commit actually says > trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases. So if you take this literally you're going…

Disclosing doesn't mean it will be declined, it's just a signal for reviewers.

The question is going to be: is it a USEFUL signal. I suspect not. And frankly, to be honest, as a senior developer who uses AI assistants routinely, I would consider it a serious disincentive to actually submit a PR in the first place to a repository that has such a policy. Submitting a good PR is hard work. Often an order of magnitude more work than the fix itself. If I think that a repository is going to not accept my PR just because I use a coding assistant, I'm going to be much less inclined to submit a PR at all.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#436

Post by rerdavies »

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…

Sure. But a smart person using an AI is way smarter than a smart person not using an AI. Also keep in mind that the IQ of various AIs varies dramatically. The Google Search AI, for example, has an IQ in the 80s (and it shows); whereas capable paid AIs consistently score in the 120 IQ range. Not as smart as me, but close enough. And entirely capable of doing in seconds what would take me hours to accomplish, while applying every single one of my 120+ IQ points to the problem at hand. Im my opinion, really smart people delegate.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#437

Post by rerdavies »

QuercusMax wrote: post #106
biophysboy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of think of it in terms of self-deskilling. If an OK engineer is still actively trying to learn, making mistakes, memorizing essentials, etc. then there is no issue. On the other hand, if they're surrendering 100% of their judgment to AI, then they will be mediocre.

The same people who just copy-pasted stack overflow answers and didn't understand why or how things work are now using AI to create stuff that they also don't understand.

lol. I am SO glad I don't have to go to StackExchange anymore. There is something toxically awful about using advice from a thread that starts with "Why doesn't my code work?".

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#438

Post by rerdavies »

furyofantares wrote: post #309
Forgeties79 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ok” I generally associate with being adequate but could obviously be better. “Mediocre” is just inadequate.

Some synonyms for mediocre: decent, middling, ordinary, so-so. It can mean inadequate, but it can also mean adequate.

Another common synonym for mediocre: has no place on a software development team. Not technically correct, admittedly, but that's how I read that word in an software engineering context. Adequate is not good enough.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#439

Post by zackmorris »

Um, no.

Doesn't anyone see that this can't be policed or everyone becomes a criminal? That AI will bring the end of copyrights and patents as we know them when literally everything becomes a derivative work? When children produce better solutions than industry veterans so we punish them rather than questioning the divine right of corporations to rule over us? What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?

I wonder if a lot of you are as humbled as I am by the arrival of AI. Whenever I use it, I'm in awe of what it comes up with when provided almost no context, coming in cold to something that I've been mulling over for hours. And it's only getting better. In 3-5 years, it will leave all of us behind. I'm saying that as someone who's done this for decades and has been down rabbit holes that most people have no frame of reference for.

My prediction is that like with everything, we'll bungle this. Those of you with big egos and large hoards of wealth that you thought you earned because you are clever will do everything you can to micromanage and sabotage what could have been the first viable path to liberation from labor in human history. Just like with the chilling effects of the Grand Upright Music ruling and the DMCA and HBO suing BitTorrent users (edit: I meant the MPAA and RIAA, HBO "only" got people's internet shut off), we have to remain eternally vigilant or the powers that be will take away all the fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent#C...

So no, I won't even entertain the notion of demanding proof of origin for ideas. I'm not going down this slippery slope of suing every open source project that gives away its code for free, just because a PR put pieces together in a new way but someone thought of the same idea in private and thinks they're special.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#440

Post by hombre_fatal »

nullc wrote: post #349
potsandpans wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nondismissive way, I see things like this (the gh issue) as part of the reactionary movement / counter culture of our time. People want to feel agency and will react to mainstream pressures. And make up whatever excuses along the way to justify what theyre feeling.

I don't think it has anything to do with being a reactionary movement or counter culture. If it were I would expect, among other things, that it would absolutely prohibit the use of AI entirely rather than just require disclosure. The background is that many higher profile open source projects are getting deluged by low quality AI slop "contributions", not just crappy code but when you ask questions about it you some…

Yeah, but this is once again doing the thing where you read someone replying to situation #2 (in my comment) and then acting like they are denying situation #1.

I think we all grant that LLM slop is inundating everything. But a checkbox that says "I am human" is more of a performative stunt (which I think they are referring to when they say it's reactionary) than anything practical.

Cloudflare's "I am human" checkbox doesn't just take your word for it, and imagine if it did.

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People who write good, thoughtful code and also use an LLM have no reason to disclose it just because the idea offends someone, just like I don't disclose when I do an amphetamine bender to catch up in work; I don't want to deal with any prejudices someone might have, but I know I do good work and that's what matters. I pressed tab so the LLM could autocomplete the unit test for me because it's similar to the other 20 unit tests, and then I vetted the completion. I'm not going to roleplay with anyone that I did something bad or dishonest or sloppy here; I'm too experienced to know better.

People who write slop that they can't even bother to read themselves aren't going to bother to read your rules either. Yet that's the group OP is pretending he's going to stop. Once you get past the "rah-rah LLM sux0rs amirite fellow HNers?" commentary, there's nothing here.

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