Re: [PATCH RFC] coding-assistants: simplify attribution

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> writes:

> I remain very confused by our coding assistant contribution guidelines.
> I'm going to be a bit polemic now but this seriously in good faith.
>
> Why precisely do we require all this detailed information about what
> specific coding assistant was used?

From my memory of the discussions:

- If a specific LLM turns out to be in a bad position with regard to
  some copyright ruling, we can identify the commits that might have
  been tainted by it.

- Similarly should an LLM prove to have an inclination toward specific
  types of security issues.

Whether either of these would ever actually prove useful is not
something I can hazard a guess for.

> I find it very irritating that our git history has effectively started
> to function a bit like a free advertising platform for a bunch of AI
> companies and their proprietary agents and models.
>
> And it reamins unclear to me what exactly we do get out of this detailed
> information: Do we want to run statistical analysis on what agent and
> model is used the most and publish that on LWN at some point?

...wasn't in my plans ...

> I acknowledge that my stance is even more radical: imho we would just
> stop it with any disclosure requirements completely. It's useless imho.
> We already see that other than core contributors most people don't care
> and will just not disclose their usage of AI.

The widespread ignoring of the disclosure rule is, IMO, something we
need to address somehow; were I still on the TAB, I'd be raising the
issue there.  Either we find a way to be serious about enforcing the
disclosure rule, or we should just drop it.  A rule that everybody
ignores is less than useful.

(That said, 706 commits in 7.2-rc1 include Assisted-by tags, so *some*
people are complying.  That's about 5% of the total.  What do we think
is the actual use of LLMs for the creation of kernel patches?)

jon