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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

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Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#321

Post by Klonoar »

lrvick wrote: post #184
qsort wrote: post #5

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people acting in good faith can get behind.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Reads like a “fuck you and I’ll see you tomorrow” threat.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#322

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

martin-t wrote: post #280
Muromec wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time. As a person who works for a company with 25k people, I would disagree. You, a single person will often get to the basic product that a lot of people will want much faster than a company with 1k, 5k and 25k people. Bigger companies are constrained by internal processes, piles of exis…

The point wasn't about the number of people, the point was a company which employs that number of people has enough money which can be converted to leverage against you. Besides that, your whole arguments hinges on large companies being inflexible, inefficient and poorly run. Isn't that exactly the kind of problem AI promises to solve? Complete AI surveillance of every employee, tasks and instructions tailored to eac…

Large companies are often inflexible and inefficient as a matter of deliberate strategy. I've found myself in scenarios where we have a complete software artifact that a smaller company would launch and find successful, but we can't launch it, because we have to satisfy some expectation we've set or do a complex integration with some important other system of ours.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#323

Post by intended »

cinntaile wrote: post #217
sdevonoes wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every change is good, and sometimes we realise too late

What is it that worries you about the change that is happening?

People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer.

In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans.

This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low confidence in your skill.

> LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

> https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#324

Post by inglor_cz »

ninjagoo wrote: post #85
jillesvangurp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright. The work might hypothetically infringe on other people's copyright. But such an infringement does not happen until a human decides to create and distribute a work that somehow integrates that generated code or text. The solution documented here seems very pragmatic. You as a contribut…

IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and derivatives of a covered work are already covered under copyright. So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in different color theme, that's likely infringement without permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against someone , either…

Starry Night is public domain everywhere (van Gogh died 136 years ago and AFAIK there is no place on Earth that would have copyright that long).

But your point still stands.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#326

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Weird that they're co-opting the "Assisted-by:" trailer to tag software and model being used. This trailer was previously used to tag someone else who has assisted in the commit in some way. Now it has two distinct usages.

The typical trailer for this is "AI-assistant:".

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#327

Post by adrian_b »

OtomotO wrote: post #245
Luker88 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

So, how are you gonna prove I didn't write some code? How am I gonna prove I did?

They do not have to prove anything.

They can just generate the same code with an AI assistant, and then it is you who cannot claim that their code infringes the copyright that you claim for the code that you have written with assistance.

So neither of the 2 parties that have used an AI assistant is able to prevent the other party to use the generated code.

I consider this as a rather good outcome and not as a disadvantage of using AI assistants. However, this may be construed as a problem by the stupid corporate lawyers who insist that any product of the company must use only software IP than is the property of the company.

These kind of lawyers are encountered in many companies and they are the main reason for the low software productivity that was typical in many places before the use of AI assistants.

I wonder how many of those lawyers have already understood that this new fashion of using AI is incompatible with their mandated policies, which have always been the main blocker against efficient software reuse.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#328

Post by matheusmoreira »

pibaker wrote: post #136
qsort wrote: post #5

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people acting in good faith can get behind.

I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call the…

On the other hand, it seriously sucks to spend time learning a big codebase and modifying it with care, only to not be given the time of day when you send the patches to the maintainers. Sometimes the reward for this human labor isn't a sincere peer review of the work and a productive back-and-forth to iron out issues before merging, it's to watch one's work languish unnoticed for a long time only for the maintainer to show up after the fact and write his own fix or implementation while giving you a shout out in the commit message if you're lucky.

Can't really blame people for reducing their level of effort. It's very easy to put in a lot of effort and end up with absolutely nothing to show for it. Before AI came along, my realization was that begging the maintainers to implement the features I wanted was the right move. They have all the context and can do it better than us in a fraction of the time it'd take us to do it. Actually cloning someone else's repository and working on it should only be attempted if one is willing to literally fork it and own the project should things go south. Now that we have AI, it's actually possible to easily understand and modify complex codebases, and I simply cannot find the will to blame people for using it to the fullest extent. Getting the AI to maintain the fork is really easy too.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#329

Post by jayd16 »

lrvick wrote: post #210
Luker88 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it. The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.

This means that all copyleft is MIT but it doesn't change the closed source stuff... So once again it benefits corpo more than most.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#330

Post by jayd16 »

lrvick wrote: post #222
Luker88 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now? They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source. "corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed. What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.

So the argument is just "AI is magic and any kind of software can be rewritten for free"? Not really sure I buy it...
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