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Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

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Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#131

This is signed off primarily by RedHat, and they tend to be pretty serious/corporate. I suspect their concern is not so much whether users have own the copyright to AI output but rather the risk that AI will spit out code from its training set that belongs to another project. Most hypervisors are closed source and some are developed by litigious companies.

I'd also worry that a language model is much more likely to introduce subtle logical errors, potentially ones which violate the hypervisor's security boundaries - and a user relying heavily on that model to write code for them will be much less prepared to detect those errors.

Generally speaking AI will make it easier to write more secure code. Tooling and automation help a lot with security and AI makes it easier to write good tooling.

I would wager good money that in a few years the most security-focused companies will be relying heavily on AI somewhere in their software supply chain.

So I don't think this policy is about security posture. No doubt human experts are reviewing the security-relevant patches anyway.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#133
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't release someone else's proprietary source under a "do whatever the fuck you want" license and actually do whatever the fuck you want, without getting sued.

It’d be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone

It's incredible watching someone who has no idea what they're talking about boast so confidently about what people "can" or "can't" do

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#134
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather the risk that AI will spit out code from its training set that belongs to another project. this is everything that it spits out

This is an uninformed take

It is a legally untested take

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#136

Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain. In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the res…

> or public domain https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Im pretty sure that this ship has sailed.

QEMU: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#137

Oh hey, the thing I predicted in my blog titled "yes i will judge you for using AI" happened lol Basically I think open source has traditionally HEAVILY relied on hidden competency markers to judge the quality of incoming contributions. LLMs throw that entire concept on its head by presenting code that has competent markers but none of the backing experience. It is a very very jarring experience for experienced indiv…

I've started seeing this at work with coworkers using LLMs to generate code reviews. They submit comments which are way above their skill level which almost trick you in to thinking they are correct since only a very skilled developer would make these suggestions. And then ultimately you end up wasting tons of time proving how these suggestions are wrong. Spending far more time than the person pasting the suggestions…

I'm not really in the field any longer, but one of my favorite things to do with LLMs is ask for code reviews. I usually end up learning something new. And a good 30-50% of the suggestions are useful. Which actually isn't skillful enough to give it a title of "code reviewer", so I certainly wouldn't foist the suggestions on someone else.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#138
post #93

This seems absolutely impossible to enforce. All my editors give me AI assisted code hints. Zed, cursor, VS code. All of them now show me autocomplete that comes from an LLM. There's absolutely no distinction between that code, and code that I've typed out myself. It's like complaining that I may have no legal right to submit my stick figure because I potentially copied it from the drawing of another stick figure. I'…

> I'm firmly convinced that these policies are only written to have plausible deniability when stuff with generated code gets inevitably submitted anyway. Of course it is. And nobody said otherwise, because that is explicitly stated on the commit message: [...] More broadly there is, as yet, no broad consensus on the licensing implications of code generators trained on inputs under a wide variety of licenses And in t…

I think most people don't make money by submitting code to QEMU, so there isn't that much incentive to cheat.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#139
post #63

Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain. In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the res…

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally. #1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models. #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will no…

Regarding #1, at least in the mainframe/cloud model of hosted LLMs, the operators have a history of model prompts and outputs.

For example, if using Copilot, Microsoft also has every commit ever made if the project is on GitHub.

They could, theoretically, determine what did or didn't come out of their models and was integrated into source trees.

Regarding #2 and #3, with relatively novel software like QEMU that models platforms that other open source software doesn't, LLMs might not be a good fit for contributions. Especially where emulation and hardware accuracy, timing, quirks, errata etc matter.

For example, modeling a new architecture or emulating new hardware might have LLMs generating convincing looking nonsense. Similarly, integrating them with newly added and changing APIs like in kvm might be a poor choice for LLM use.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would need to be more than that. A prompt for one model can have different results vs another. Even when the model has different treatment for inference, eg quantization, the same prompt for the unquantized and quantized model could differ.

Even more so, when you come back to understand in a few years, the model will no longer be available

One of several reasons to use an open model even if it isn't quite as good. Version control the models and commit the prompts with the model name and a hash of the parameters. I'm not really sure what value that reproducibility adds though.
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