Re: [PATCH v2] SubmittingPatches: add section about AI

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2025, 08:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD3wc-aj27Q_kFXvknJrpa-ySWbZiPmNCTMboA08=HP+xw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq4isi1gpm.fsf@gitster.g>

On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 10:59 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 26 quoted lines

>
> Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > As more and more developer tools use AI, we are facing two main risks
> > related to AI generated content:
> >
> >   - its situation regarding copyright and license is not clear,
> >     and:
> >
> >   - more and more bad quality content could be submitted for review to
> >     the mailing list.
> >
> > To mitigate both risks, let's add an "Use of Artificial Intelligence"
> > section to "Documentation/SubmittingPatches" with the goal of
> > discouraging its blind use to generate content that is submitted to
> > the project, while still allowing us to benefit from its help in some
> > innovative, useful and less risky ways.
> >
> > Helped-by: Rick Sanders <rick@sfconservancy.org>
> > Signed-off-by: Christian Couder <chriscool@tuxfamily.org>
> >
> > ---
> > This is inspired by the "AI guidelines" section we already have for
>
> A more important thing to mention is that Rick is a lawyer at SFC
> helped us to draft the wording used in this one.

Yeah, right, I will mention it in a v3 if there is one.

Show 24 quoted lines

> > +[[ai]]
> > +=== Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
> > +
> > +The Developer's Certificate of Origin requires contributors to certify
> > +that they know the origin of their contributions to the project and
> > +that they have the right to submit it under the project's license.
> > +It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
> > +significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools.
> > +
> > +Another issue with AI generated content is that AIs still often
> > +hallucinate or just produce bad code, commit messages, documentation
> > +or output, even when you point out their mistakes.
> > +
> > +To avoid these issues, we will reject anything that looks AI
> > +generated, that sounds overly formal or bloated, that looks like AI
> > +slop, that looks good on the surface but makes no sense, or that
> > +senders don’t understand or cannot explain.
>
> A milder way to phrase this would be to jump directly to "we reject
> what the sender cannot explain when asked about it".  "How does this
> work?"  "Why is this a good thing to do?"  "Where did it come from?"
> instead of saying "looks AI generated".
>
> It would sidestep the "who decides if it looks AI generated?" question.

I don't think the "who decides if it looks AI generated?" question is very relevant. If someone says that a patch looks mostly AI generated and gives a good argument supporting this claim, it's the same as if someone gives any other good argument against the patch. In the end, the community and you decide if the argument is good enough and if the patch should be rejected based on that (and other arguments for and against the patch of course).

For example, let's suppose that in the future someone knows that ChatGPT7 is very likely to use double dash ("--") and the word "absolutely" a lot in its sentences, and notices that a contributor sent a long documentation patch that is full of them. I would say that it would be a good argument to reject that patch. We could be wrong in rejecting the patch because of that argument, because maybe the writer's style happens to be similar to ChatGPT7's style, but I think we should have the possibility to reject such patches based on the fact that they definitely look AI generated. Otherwise I don't think we can seriously claim that we try to uphold the DCO as well as we can.

So I think we definitely need to say something like "we will reject anything that looks AI generated" or maybe "we will reject anything that looks significantly AI generated". In the v3 if there is one, I will change the wording to the latter.

Thanks.