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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

#331

Post by williamcotton »

martin-t wrote: post #293
williamcotton wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]." That LLM response is describing a specific project with full attribution.

And it proves the code is stored (in a compressed form) in the model.

So what's the legal issue here?

How does the chardet achieve this? Explain in detail, with shortened code excerpts from the library itself if helpful to the explanation.

The prompt is explicitly requesting the source!

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#333

Post by kelnos »

pixel_popping wrote: post #31
pydry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it puts a stop to the tsunami of slop and it's pretty much impossible to prove anything of value was lost.

but why? it's a human making the PR and you can shame/ban that human anyway.

That takes effort that I'd rather spend doing other things.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#334

Post by matheusmoreira »

cinntaile wrote: post #243
dwedge wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of something I read on mastodon: "genie doesn't go back in the bottle say AI promoters while the industry spends a trillion dollars a year to try to keep the genie out of the bottle"

Do you think the genie will go back in the bottle and why?

It's certainly possible. All that is required is for AIs to become more expensive than humans. Developing projects on a $100 Claude Code subscription is a lot of fun. I bet people would simply go back to hiring human developers if that subscription cost $10,000 instead.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#335

Post by MyUltiDev »

Reading this right after the Sashiko endorsement is a bit jarring. Greg KH greenlit an AI reviewer running on every patch a couple weeks back, and that direction actually seems to be helping, while here the conversation is still about whether contributors will take responsibility for AI code they submit. That feels like the harder side to police. The bugs that land kernel teams in trouble are race conditions, locking, lifetimes, the things models are most confidently wrong about. I have seen agents produce code that compiles cleanly, reads fine on a Friday review, then deadlocks under contention three weeks later. Is this contributor policy supposed to be the long term answer, or a placeholder until something Sashiko-shaped does the heavy filtering on the maintainer side too?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#336

Post by xxpor »

intended wrote: post #323
cinntaile wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conf…

While I agree with this intuitively, I also just can't get past the argument that people said the same thing when we switched from everyone using ASM to C/Fortran etc.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#337

Post by oompydoompy74 »

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 wish everyone could be so rational, well reasoned, and balanced on this subject.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#338

Post by positron26 »

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.

What these hardliners are standing for, I have no idea. If the code passes review, we're just arguing about hues of zeros and ones. "AI" is an attribute that type-erases entirely once an engineer pulls out the useful expressions and whips them into shape.

The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight.

I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots.

And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future.

I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas.

So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#339

Post by oompydoompy74 »

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.

I find the strong anti AI sentiment just as annoying as the strong pro AI sentiment. I hope that the extremes can go scream in their own echo chamber soon, so that the rest of us can get back to building and talking about how to make technology useful.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#340

Post by beAbU »

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.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the woodworking community are to even a single table saw assisted cut making it's way to a piece of furniture, no matter how well designed.

Plenty see {{some_woodworker}} as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled table saw cuts is actually allowed to be used in furniture making.

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