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.
post
bold move. Can't wait to see how this gets reversed within a year
!Remindme 6 months
FYI PieFed has a reminder function, in the 3 dot menu on a post / comment.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I hate that this is the most accurate answer almost certainly. Maybe it'll shame people into not submitting more often than it would've for people sneaking it in.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I hope they are prepare for the AI slop DDoS. Curl wasn't, and they didn't even state they would welcome AI contributions.
all 17 comments