Re: [PATCH] Documentation: remove the requirement for LLM attribution

[Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>]

On Thu, 2026-07-02 at 17:07 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 10:32:48AM -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
> > We've had this requirement in place in the Documentation for several
> > months, but it's becoming clear that the signal to noise ratio from this
> > is quite low.
> > 
> > 1/ It's not universally followed. While many people do try to attribute
> > the LLMs in good faith, not everyone does for various reasons.
> 
> Then let's move to get people to follow it.
> 
> > 2/ It basically serves as free advertising for proprietary LLM companies.
> 
> Who cares, make up a name, all I want is the "signal" that someone is
> using a LLM so that I can review it as-such.  And if I think someone is
> not reporting that, I can ask for them to properly attribute it and if
> they lie, well, that's on them.
> 
> > 3/ It's not clear why we want to collect this info in the first place.
> 
> We want to know if a LLM is being used.
> 

But why? What do you intend to do with this information?

Do you mean to use it as an indicator that the patch should receive
"extra" review (or maybe that it should be ignored)? Do you mean to use
it to generate some sort of statistics at a later time? 

If we want to collect some sort of structured data like this, it would
be good to have some idea of how it will be used. That might inform the
format and content of what we're collecting.

> > Given that the data this provides is flawed at best and is being
> > collected for a purpose that isn't clear, let's just kill the
> > requirement for these tags from the kernel at large.
> 
> No, please do not do this.  It's useful already for many patches in my
> subsystems, and is only going to be used more in the future.
> 

I should have sent this as an RFC patch, but hopefully everyone is
treating that way anyway. To be clear, I don't have a strong preference
on whether we keep Assisted-by: or not, but I'd like to better
understand the intended uses of it if we do intend to keep it.
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>