I figure I'll state my personal opinion on this one. This isn't
intended to be any kind of 'veto' on the question: I don't
feel that strongly about it (and I don't think I ought to
have a personal veto in any case).
I'm not enthusiastic. The current policy is essentially
"the legal risks are unclear and the project isn't willing
to accept them". That's a straightforward rule to follow
that doesn't require either the contributor or the reviewer
or the project to make a possibly difficult judgement call on
what counts as not in fact risky. As soon as we start adding
exceptions then either we the project are making those
judgement calls, or else we're pushing them on contributors
or reviewers. I prefer the simple "'no' until the legal
picture becomes less murky" rule we have currently.
In principle I agree. I am not enthusiastic either. There are however two problems in the current policy.
First, the policy is based on a honor code; in some cases the use of AI can be easily spotted, but in general it's anything but trivial especially in capable hands where, for example, code is generated by AI but commit messages are not. As such, the policy cannot prevent inclusion of AI generated code, it only tells you who is to blame.
Second, for this specific kind of change it is, pretty much, impossible to tell whether it's generated with AI or by a specialized tool or by hand. If you provide a way for people to be honest about their tool usage, and allow it at least in some cases, there's a nonzero chance they will be; if you just tell them a hard no, and lying by omission has more than plausible deniability, there's a relatively high chance that they will just stay silent on the matter while still using the tool.
In other words, as much as I would also like a simple policy, I expect fewer undiscovered violations with the exception in place—even beyond what the exception allows. And given the stated goal of using proposals and actual usage to inform future policy, this approach could serve that goal better than plain prohibition.
That said, I am okay with having no exception if that's the consensus.
Thanks,
Paolo