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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

#341

Post by OtomotO »

adrian_b wrote: post #327
OtomotO wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disadva…

I was talking more generally about the "You can't patent or copyright code that was generated with an LLM".

Who can prove that I didn't write the code myself? And if I did, how am I to prove it?

That goes in both directions.

It's not like there is a watermark in the code telling the whole wide world that this was AI generated or human made.

So I write code (with or without an AI assistant) and claim copyright... they generate the same code. I sue them.

How does any of us prove that we wrote the code by hand?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#342

Post by cat_plus_plus »

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…

That's a dim view, people also contribute to make projects work for their own needs with hopes to share fixes with others. Like if I make a fix to vLLM to make a model load on particular hardware, I can verify functionality (LLM no longer strays off topic) and local plausibility (global scales are being applied to attention layers), but I can't pretend to understand full math of the overall process and will never have enough time to do so. So, I can be upfront about AI assist and then maintainer can choose to double check, or else if they don't have time, I guess I can just post a PR link on model's huggingface page and tell others with same hardware they can try to cherrypick it.

What's missed is that neither contributors nor maintainers are usually paid for their effort and nobody has standing to demand that they do anything they are not doing already. Don't like a messy vibe coded PR but need functionality? Then clean it up yourself and send improved version for review. Or let it be unmerged. But don't assign work to others you don't employ.

On the other hand, companies like NVIDIA should be publicly taken to task for changing their mind about instruction set for every new GPU and then not supporting them properly in popular inference engines, they certainly have enough money to hire people who will learn vLLM inside out and ensure high quality patches.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#343

Post by agentultra »

beAbU wrote: post #340
lrvick wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a stark difference between a table saw and an LLM that weakens this argument.

A table saw isn't a probabilistic device.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#344

Post by martin-t »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #322
martin-t wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lesson from gamedev is that players will deliberately restrict themselves - sometimes to make the game more fun or challenging, sometimes to appeal to their aesthetic principles.

If/when superhuman AI is achieved, those limitations will all go away. An owner will just give it money and control and tell it to optimize for more money or political power or whatever he wants.

That's a much scarier future than a paperclip maximizer because it's much closer and it doesn't require complete takeover first, it'll be just business as usual, except more somehow more sociopathic.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#345

Post by theshrike79 »

agentultra wrote: post #343
beAbU wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a stark difference between a table saw and an LLM that weakens this argument. A table saw isn't a probabilistic device.

But I, a woodworker, can immediately see if the piece of wood that came out of the table saw looks like it should.

Also I, a programmer, can immediately see whether the "probabilistic device" generated code that looks like it should.

Both just let me get to the same result faster with good enough quality for the situation.

I can grab a tape measure or calipers and examine the piece of wood I cut on the table saw and check if it has the correct measurements. I can also use automated tests and checks to see that the code produced looks as it should and acts as it should.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Do we really need to care if the duck was generated by an AI?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#346

Post by martin-t »

ninjagoo wrote: post #138
martin-t wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Moral Bottomline: if you didn't have to eat, would you care about who copies your work as long as you get credited? Yes. I have 2 issues with "post-scarcity": - It often implicitly assumes humanity is one homogeneous group where this state applies to everyone. In reality, if post-scarcity is possible, some people will be lucky enough to have the means to live that lifestyle while others will still by dying of h…

> In reality, if post-scarcity is possible, some people will be lucky enough to have the means to live that lifestyle while others will still by dying of hunger, exposure and preventable diseases. By definition, that's not a post-scarcity world; and that's already today's world. > It often ignores that some people are OK with having enough while others have a need to have more than others, no matter how much they alr…

> trained out of the kids

I don't think you understand how children work.

You probably imagine some Brave New World kind of conditioning. Not to mention, those people will want their kids to have those traits.

> Hopefully, your code helped someone. That's a good enough reason to do it.

No. That's like saying that the V2 rocket program helped keep a bunch of people out of the gas chambers.

We should absolutely do our best to make sure our work does more good than harm, not just that it does some good.

EDIT: I am sad to see your other comment below flagged/dead. HN does not like the idea that a lowly open source contributor could take their phones and computers away from them for petty things like genocide, murder or rape...

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#347

Post by rao-v »

A phenomenon I can not explain is the fact that this simple clean statement of a fairly obvious approach to AI assistance somehow took this long and Linus to state so cleanly.

Are there other popular repos with effectively this policy stated as neatly that I’ve missed?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#348

Post by agentultra »

How do the reviewers feel about this? Hopefully it won't result in them being overwhelmed with PRs. There used to be a kind of "natural limit" to error rates in our code given how much we could produce at once and our risk tolerance for approving changes. Given empirical studies on informal code review which demonstrate how ineffective it is at preventing errors... it seems like we're gearing up to aim a fire-hose of code at people who are ill-prepared to review code at these new volumes.

How long until people get exhausted with the new volume of code review and start "trusting" the LLMs more without sufficient review, I wonder?

I don't envy Linus in his position... hopefully this approach will work out well for the team.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#349

Post by theshrike79 »

Lapel2742 wrote: post #235
oytis wrote: post #232

How is one supposed to ensure license compliance while using LLMs which do not (and cannot) attribute sources having contributed to a specific response?

> How one is supposed to ensure license compliance while using LLMs which do not (and cannot) attribute sources having contributed to a specific response? Additionally there seems to be a general problem with LLM output and copyright[1]. At least in Germany. LLM output cannot be copyrighted and the whole legal field seems under-explored. > This immediately raises the question of who is the author of this work and who…

Either you allow LLM generated + human reviewed code or people start hiding AI use.

...and then people start going "that's AI" on every single piece of code, seeing AI generated code left and right - like normal people claim every other picture, video or piece of text is "AI".

IMO it's a lot better to let people just openly say "this code was generated with AI assistance", but still sign off on it. Because "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

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