The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it's properly disclosed and transparent.

The AI-assisted contributions policy outlined in this Fedora Council ticket is now approved for the Fedora project moving forward. AI-assisted code contributions can be used but the contributor must take responsibility for that contribution, it must be transparent in disclosing the use of AI such as with the "Assisted-by" tag, and that AI can help in assisting human reviewers/evaluation but must not be the sole or final arbiter. This AI policy also doesn't cover large-scale initiatives which will need to be handled individually with the Fedora Council.

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[–] 61 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I think not allowing it at all would be worse, because then people start claiming not to use Ai while they secretly do. Allowing it with a disclosure at least makes this process a bit more transparent. You can think about ai what you want, at least handling it this way is better than not allowing it at all.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    bold move. Can't wait to see how this gets reversed within a year
    !Remindme 6 months

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    FYI PieFed has a reminder function, in the 3 dot menu on a post / comment.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Much of distribution development is writing menial scripts and SPEC files. It's tedious work with little creativity. The last SPEC file for an RPM package I wrote from scratch was years ago but it was so tedious work. The Arch maintainers even argue that their PKGBUILD files are so simple, they don't pass the so-called threshold of originality and therefore are public domain anyway.

    Much can be (and probably already is) automated. Compilation directives like CMake files already contain all the info needed to generate a workable if a bit bare bones SPEC file. I'd say an LLM might even be overkill for what a script could also achieve. The result is public domain anyway.

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  • [+] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Unfortunate. Announcing this when everyone is migrating from windows... a lot of which is because of the AI bullshit in it... seems like throwing the stick in the spokes move.

    I guess it's time to go shopping for a new distro :(

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I guess it’s time to go shopping for a new distro :(

    If you think that undisclosed AI contributions aren't happening everywhere, you're delusional.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Doesn't mean I have to support the ones that actively encourage it.

    I guess it's time for some of the projects to start putting little stickers that say "hand crafted code" on them explicitly.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Properly attributed generated lines are easier to remove should courts declare them illegal.

    What would projects with undeclared AI code do? Shut everything down? Revert everything until the commit before ChatGPT launched? Just say yolo and go on?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Awh yeah because the type of person to use a chatbot is definitely the type of person to be honest and not take credit for what the chatbot outputs. No fucker is gonna disclose this unless they're trying to sell a chatbot model to a greater fool.

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  • fedora living up to its name i see

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I honestly don't see the use case

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  • 11 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    The alternative here is they don't allow it and get a bunch of MRs sneakily using AI anyway but not disclosing it. I'd rather be aware that an MR was made with AI than not, personally, so I think this is probably the right move.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean also shouldn’t somebody be reviewing these MRs? I’m an infra guy not a programmer but doesn’t it like, not really matter how the code in the MR was made as long as it’s reviewed and validated?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    The problem with that is that reviewing takes time. Valuable maintainer time.

    Curl faced this issue. Hundreds of AI slop "security vulnerabilities" were submitted to curl. Since they are security vulnerabilities, they can't just ignore them, they had to read every one of them, only to find out they weren't real. Wasting a bunch of time.

    Most of the slop was basically people typing into chatgpt "find me a security vulnerability of a project that has a bounty for finding one" and just copy-pasting whatever it said in a bug report.

    With simple MRs at least you can just ignore the AI ones an priorize the human ones if you don't have enough time. But that will just lead to AI slop not being marked as such in order to skip the low-prio AI queue.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If one wants to avoid software with AI code then being aware which MRs need replacing helps. However, accepting it encourages it more and makes it less fesible that you could prune all the MRs written in part by AI. Disclosing it will become worthless if it becomes the norm.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    If the code is good I don't have an issue with it being merged even if ai was used, that being said I bet the obvious outcome is that either people ignore the policy and nothing changes or they comply and most reviewers focus on the non-ai group which is how it was before ai. All in all, this decision can never hurt the development, since as far as I am aware there is no requirement to review an MR.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    As long as it's properly tagged so we can avoid the hell out of it

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I hope they are prepare for the AI slop DDoS. Curl wasn't, and they didn't even state they would welcome AI contributions.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago
    [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Oh, come the fuck on…

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