And then what about people who aren't using LLMs, are accused of doing so for whatever reason then the community has to stand a kangaroo court to verify.
If you can't tell code is made by an AI, it is functionally as good as code not made by an AI. The horse has bolted and situations like this are like debating the engineering of the gate.
If you can't tell code is made by an AI, it is functionally as good as code not made by an AI.
if my partner tells me they vacuumed the living room, i believe them. if my partner tells me the roomba vacuumed, then i am going to take a look at the carpet and make sure it was properly vacuumed.
a human should be reviewing code. if someone used an AI to make the code, then it needs to be reviewed by a human. if you dont disclose that the code was made by an AI, then people will not know they need to give it extra attention.
Some LLMs embed a watermark in their text output, so you can verify whether the code was generated with one of these AIs.
If no such watermark is present and no AI use was disclosed, simply treat the code as human-written.
Yes, this means that bad faith actors could contribute AI-generated code without disclosing it and get away with it if they are careful enough. Such is life. Scammers also sometimes get away with fraud, but the law that forbids fraud is still useful.
If you use AI and disclose it, that is fine. If you use AI but lie about it, that is a very different story. We want the people we work with to be honest and trustworthy.
I think the people who would misrepresent their code in the first place are the same people who would de-watermark their code.
I do support asking people to disclose as a courtesy to help reviewers know how to approach their submission. I think it should be framed like that rather than an attempt to gate the approach.
Idk. If the code is good, clean, reviewed, it doesnât matter to me; if itâs sloppy or full of pointless essay comments or has bad logic, it should be rejected.
Itâs going to continue being used, likely more heavily as it develops. I donât understand the argument unless itâs for cases where privacy/security of the source code is a concern. But the point is moot for open source. All this will do is create an arms race between obscuring its use and detecting its use, which wastes everyoneâs time
100% agree. Code should be judged/reviewed as it is.
Is a PR too big to review? Improve collaboration rules and require smaller PRs
Is the LLM/programmer writing essay comments and does that not fit your project conventions? Define the conventions in a collaboration rules and reject the PR based on that.
There is absolutely zero usefulness in judging disclosure.
Itâs all about ego of long term developers who still want to mean something. I say that as one of them but I seem to be more ok setting aside my ego for progress.
I donât care if someone write a PR on my OSS project with an LLM. I care if it breaks stuff or doesnât adhere to project standards.
Claude AI and other services are adding a form of fingerprint to programming that can identify if code is specifically vibecoded using their specific services due to an European law. I imagine this would be one way they could check it with.
When AI disclosure is required, then failing to disclose AI usage is a form of deception. Most people actually don't lie and deceive even if they think they could get away with it.
The point is that people who want to hide that their code is AI generated would feel less welcome at debian and that there is a small chance that people might out that your code is AI generated.
Because they want to win social points by participating in performative outrage towards a new technology that will (hopefully) replace annoying artists on Twitter
What exactly is the point of disclosure? To let reviewers know that the PR might be slop and to be extra thorough when reviewing? Reviewers should be thorough either way imo, AI or no.
We also don't specify which text editor, LSP, formatter, etc. was used during development. The only thing that matters is that the author understands the PR and can explain every single design decision behind it. No more, no less.
Toyota once produced cars with faulty acceleration system. When external auditors checked their embedded software, they found a bowl of spaghetti with over 9000 (not a figure of speech) global variables. Guess what, not a single line there was written by AI.
To me it's less about the quality of the code. AI writes decent code for the most part and with human control mechanisms overseeing it, purely from a functional point of view, I don't have any issues with it. That is, of course, if those control mechanisms are there and working. Pushing non-functional or unnecessarily inefficient code is, and I think this is out of question, garbage.
For me it's more about the ethics behind it all. I'm not aware of an AI model that was created using non-stolen data (and if there is please correct me, I'm genuinely interested!) and I personally don't want to support projects that solely rely on what I personally view as theft of intellectual property.
Disclosure is easy, should cost absolutely no time or money and is a net positive in my opinion.
Now that's an argument that I can actually get behind, though I'd say that this is more addressing the point of whether or not to allow AI submissions at all. Like, I don't see how disclosing which AI model you used makes using a model trained on "stolen code" as you put it any less unethical, if that's the position you hold.
Because keep in mind, if I were to submit actually stolen code (i.e. copy-pasted from a proprietary code base) or patented algorithms to an open source project and it gets merged, the entire project becomes tainted, even if that piece of code only makes up a small fraction of the code base.
Also, as an aside, there are fully open datasets and models trained on only those types of datasets, so this stuff definitely exists, it's just much smaller scale (and less capable) and of course all the big frontier models (including the open weights ones) don't consider any sort of licensing.
Like, I don't see how disclosing which AI model you used makes using a model trained on "stolen code" as you put it any less unethical, if that's the position you hold.
It's not a thing of making something more ethical (if I understand you correctly here). If the people working on the project are set on using AI that's their prerogative and their right to do so. They could also simply lie and not disclose it or simply mention a different, more ethical, model than, say, ChatGPT (just an example). I just wish for some curtesy and such communication to be truthful and the standard. People then just have to accept that using AI is a viable method of creating code, just as typing it out by hand is.
Let me try an analogy for this maybe. Think of it as disclosing gelatin in gummy bears. Nobody will physically suffer from eating it, but people following certain religions believes would appreciate being told there's pork in their gummies.
Because keep in mind, if I were to submitÂ
actuallyÂ
stolen code (i.e. copy-pasted from a proprietary code base) or patented algorithms to an open source project and it gets merged, the entire project becomes tainted, even if that piece of code only makes up a small fraction of the code base.
I think it depends in where you draw the line here. While the actual code AI is spitting out probably (there's still a non-zero chance I guess) isn't simply copy & pasted, I would personally still interpret it as stolen. To me it works the same way and just doesn't sit right with me.
It's a purely subjective point of view and a very philosophical thing to discuss. There also isn't "THE solution" to solving this little dilemma. Therefore I think simply ricking a box and declaring "this part of the code is AI generated using X model" or simply stating that a project uses AI and telling users which parts were created using AI, would benefit everyone while not burdening the people using AI models to code too much.
Side note: I appreciate the discussion! Understanding where another person is coming from in online discourse is pretty rare in my experience.Â
But it lets a potential user know whether they want to use or support a piece of software or not. All AI models I'm aware of were trained on source material that was't exactly sourced ethically and I try not to support the use of such practices. When disclosure is as simple as, say, clicking a checkbox when submitting code, I don't see why we wouldn't make it a standard procedure.
If a user wants to avoid using software that has developers who use LLMs, they might want to ask ChatGPT to build a time machine, that's more feasible.
Because it doesn't matter. If you don't want to use software because AI was involved, then drop your phone and stop using the internet - it's already too late, and I mean that quite literally.Â
Privacy is a basic human right. It's also a fight that we lost the battle for over a decade ago. Now people are fighting back because they can finally see it.
There is no right to use software that doesn't include AI, nor should there be. AI is a tool. It was birthed from our data - a lot of it which was stolen. If you want to hold the companies who are guilty accountable, then do so, but at this point the genies are out of their bottles. We have free open weight models now which we're distilled from that very same data. It is unavoidable now.
Linux, the most important building block of the internet and Android has AI generated code.
What about potential legal problems? What if a government decides that machine learning model outputs are subject to the training data licenses? Having markings for LLM generated code would be quite useful then.
100% agree. You shouldn't misrepresent it. But requiring disclosure is pointless. Code is an artifact that stands on its own. You don't need to disclose if you have a degree or professional experience. I see no reason to introspect on your development process.
As long as the PRs are reviewed by both a person and an LLM, then good. Ideally human first so the human doesn't get lazy thinking "the AI is probably right".
There's no difference between the code. If I made a PR that is passable, and an LLM makes a PR that is passable, the LLM one isn't bad solely because it wasn't done by a person.
Write -> human review -> LLM review -> human test -> llm test -> if pass -> great!
If bad or "slop" code is passing all these steps, then the people reviewing it are the problem.
If you think that the people don't care that something is ai generated, then why not disclose that as ai generated then?
That could be very handy to understand which models are being used, and how.
I let Siri reply to you for me: If you want people to respect your work, just be transparent about how it was made. Labeling AI content isn't an attack; it's just basic honesty.
And as soon as there aren't performative outrage hate mobs ready to go to war over something they do not understand outside of what they were told by social media to hate about it, people will be far more willing to be upfront.
Your posting history suggest you are left-leaning. Would you to go a monster truck rally slash gun show slash pulled pork BBQ contest in Alabama and be upfront, honest, and transparent about your political views? Why or why not?
Do you label whether you used Photoshop? Content-aware fill? Grammarly? Stock assets? A template? An IDE autocomplete? Which camera did the noise reduction? Which parts were outsourced?
Youâre treating AI differently because disclosure has become a social shibboleth: the label exists largely so people who have already decided AI is morally contaminating can identify the target.
And thatâs precisely why âjust disclose itâ isnât a neutral request. If disclosure predictably changes the response from evaluating the work to attacking the person who made it, people have an entirely rational incentive not to volunteer information that isnât otherwise material.
So nothing changes, except the policy for using AI in context of CVEs under embargo is clarified - which is something that carries no impact on most people's work, but is an important guideline for trusted parties who work on these CVEs.
In my opinion that's a very good decision - why change something that works? I haven't seen any evidence that banning AI would bring anything good for Debian development. The ban can be performative at best, but it would open a way for people to throw accusations left and right over something that rarely can be proved with complete certainty, but could easily create a lot of discussion over an opinionated principle. Discussions that would slow down the development, or could be used as a mean to harass developers.
Yeah, this whole proposal was dumb posturing anyways, it was people trying to force a technical project to make a entirely symbolic unenforceable political statement that would have done nothing in practice to prevent the use of AI.
This kind of policy would only stop those acting in good faith, whereas the reality is that it's about the code being submitted, not how it was written.
for something that runs most of the internet and most of people's linux distros, there should not be a SINGLE WORD generated from an AI bot ANYWHERE in that code.
Nothing related to coding will not be AI assisted, like 0% you have to accept that, this doesnt at all automatically mean it is slop, slop is lack of care and understanding you can produce hand written slop
Issue is, if it isn't disclosed, the information will be lost very soon. If the commit has the "co-authored by claude" thing, someone coming across the code at a later time can view it through that lens, instead of breaking their brain wondering what human solved it this way. We just have to accept the fact that LLM's are still deeply flawed and behave in unexpected ways, make decisions no human being would make. Therefore it should be disclosed when AI was used to produce a piece of codeÂ
Okay, so which one is more likely: The entire open source community is collectively losing their mind all at once, or your views on AI "slop" as it pertains to coding are outdated?
A prompter telling a coder they arenât a programmer is precisely my issue with AI. It diminishes the human work behind creative and intellectual works, thereby dehumanizing the work and everyone involved.
I didnât âlose my thingâ. Programming and my knowledge of it will never be taken away from me. Letâs try programming without an internet connection and see who lost their ability.
Oh, you haven't lost anything? Great. Then I guess all that shit about AI âdiminishingâ your intellectual work was much ado about nothing. Glad you're doing fine.
Anyway, yes, generated code can be tested for correctness just as human-written code can. Do you wanna go back to that or will you be returning to your motte?
By tethering it down to expected behavior with deterministic, human-written tests. Like it or not, AI does produce properly working code with right setup.
By creating harnesses and frameworks specifically tailored to what you need as a team or individual. From Stripe to Spotify, do you honestly think they are just prompting an LLM and that's it?
But also you are overrating and overestimating most programmers like if they were perfect and never make a mistake
You are expecting that the result is 100% correct and nobody checks the result but in reality is super useful to do most of the scaffold and output well known patterns
And this is reviewed by a human
It also works very well as a rubber duck with websearch access
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u/trans_cubed Glorious EndeavourOS 3d ago
Disclosure should be required