Re: [PATCH v2] SubmittingPatches: add section about AI

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 2:37 PM brian m. carlson
<sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> wrote:
>
> On 2025-10-01 at 14:02:50, Christian Couder wrote:
> > +[[ai]]
> > +=== Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
> > +
> > +The Developer's Certificate of Origin requires contributors to certify
> > +that they know the origin of their contributions to the project and
> > +that they have the right to submit it under the project's license.
> > +It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
> > +significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools.
>
> Perhaps we'd like to write this:
>
>   It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
>   significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools,
>   so we cannot accept this content in our project.
>
> If we're going to have a policy, we need to be direct about it and not
> let people draw their own conclusions.  Many people don't have English
> as a first language and we don't want people trying to language lawyer.
>
> We could say something like this:
>
>   Please do not sign off your work if you’re using an LLM to contribute
>   unless you have included copyright and license information for all the
>   code used in that LLM.

Would this mean that you wanted to ban contributions like d12166d3c8bb
(Merge branch 'en/docfixes', 2023-10-23), available on the list over
at https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.1595.git.1696747527.gitgitgadget@gmail.com/
?   We don't need to go theoretical, I've already contributed such a
patch series before -- 2 years ago -- and it was merged.  Granted,
that was entirely documentation, and I called out the usage of AI in
the cover letter, and I manually checked every change (discarding many
of them) and split it into commits on my own, could easily explain any
change and why it was good, etc.  And I was upfront about all of it.

If any use of AI is bad, do we need to revert that series?