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Interesting thread. I doubt they could tell reliably if AI tools are used though.

lucb1e 3y ago
The article's answer to that: > Górny wrote that it was unlikely that the project could detect these contributions, or that it would want to actively pursue finding them. The point, he said, is to make a statement that they are undesirable. > In an emailed response to questions, Górny said that Gentoo is relying on trust in its contributors to adhere to the policy rather than trying to police contributions [...] "our primary goal is to make it clear what's acceptable and what's not, and politely ask our contributors to respect that"
xyst 3y ago
There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea it’s a crap shoot. Any it’s all based on intuition. Artwork, yea it’s kind of easy - “kid in photo has 10 fingers on one hand”. But for text, especially code or technical documentation. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell.
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    I think it does, at least until it produces better work than humans on average/median. We have enough trouble spotting bugs (including vulnerabilities) before they hit a beta or production release as it is. If the same diligence went into checking machine output, I think we would get worse code because in the scenario where you wrote it yourself (I'm imagining a patch here, not a whole project), you've got a good understanding of what you just wrote: how it's meant to work, why that method works, what the intention was with every statement. With machine output, you have to build that understanding before you can validate its work, and with the state of the art as far as I'm aware, the validation step really is necessary. It is also a matter of the universe versus the software engineers. With the universe striving to make better idiots¹ who can all tell a machine what it should do in natural language without needing ~any skills, it would be the task of other people to mop up their potential mess. (Not saying that prompt engineering is a skill, just that you can get started without having acquired that skill yet.) Open source contributions are a benefit in several ways: it looks good on your CV, you feel like you're helping society, or perhaps you just want to fix a bug that you're personally affected by. I can see legitimate motives for using "AI" as seven-league boots, but the result where someone else has to do the work for you in the end seems immoral, even if that someone can't tell if the person was just unskilled or if it's machine-generated ("AI") output ¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compiled_(1989) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...
swatcoder 3y ago
You can't automate perfect enforcement, but you can express a norm (as they have) and hold individual human contributors accountable for following it so that when a violation is discoved the humanms other contributions can be scrutinized and the human can be penalized/monitored/whatever going forward. People bicker over the quality of generated content vs human content, but accountability is actually the big challenge when granting agency to AI tools. There are many humans who might produce or contribute to a work, and when they violate norms it's accepted that we can hold the person individually accountable in some way or another -- perhaps by rejecting them, replacing them, or even suing them. Much the way mature financial systems depend on many features of legal and regulatory norms that crypto can'f deliver, most mature organizations depend on accountability that's not so easy to transfer to software agents. If there are a handful of code generators and they're granted autonomy/agency without an accountable vouchsafe, what do you do when they violate your norms? Perhaps you try to debug them, but what does that process look like for a black box instrument? How does that work when those services are hosted by third-parties who themselves reject accountability and who only expose a small interface for modification? Here, Gentoo dodges the problem entirely by saying effectively saying "we're not going to leave room for somebody to poiny to an AI tool as an excuse for errant work.. if they contribute, they need to take accountability as if the work is wholly and originally theirs by representing it as so." Contributors may violate that policy by using AI anyway, but they can't use it as an excuse/out for other violations because they now need to stay steadfast in their denial that AI was involved. So ultimately, this doesn't mean that generated code won't appear in Gentoo, but it makes sure contributed code is held to no lower a standard of accountability.

The article's answer to that: > Górny wrote that it was unlikely that the project could detect these contributions, or that it would want to actively pursue finding them. The point, he said, is to make a statement that they are undesirable. > In an emailed response to questions, Górny said that Gentoo is relying on trust in its contributors to adhere to the policy rather than trying to police contributions [...] "our primary goal is to make it clear what's acceptable and what's not, and politely ask our contributors to respect that"

xyst 3y ago

There are some cases where you can kind of tell but yea it’s a crap shoot. Any it’s all based on intuition. Artwork, yea it’s kind of easy - “kid in photo has 10 fingers on one hand”. But for text, especially code or technical documentation. I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell.

Xenoamorphous 3y ago
If no one is able to tell, does it matter?
- lucb1e 3y ago
  I think it does, at least until it produces better work than humans on average/median. We have enough trouble spotting bugs (including vulnerabilities) before they hit a beta or production release as it is. If the same diligence went into checking machine output, I think we would get worse code because in the scenario where you wrote it yourself (I'm imagining a patch here, not a whole project), you've got a good understanding of what you just wrote: how it's meant to work, why that method works, what the intention was with every statement. With machine output, you have to build that understanding before you can validate its work, and with the state of the art as far as I'm aware, the validation step really is necessary. It is also a matter of the universe versus the software engineers. With the universe striving to make better idiots¹ who can all tell a machine what it should do in natural language without needing ~any skills, it would be the task of other people to mop up their potential mess. (Not saying that prompt engineering is a skill, just that you can get started without having acquired that skill yet.) Open source contributions are a benefit in several ways: it looks good on your CV, you feel like you're helping society, or perhaps you just want to fix a bug that you're personally affected by. I can see legitimate motives for using "AI" as seven-league boots, but the result where someone else has to do the work for you in the end seems immoral, even if that someone can't tell if the person was just unskilled or if it's machine-generated ("AI") output ¹ https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compiled_(1989) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rick_Cook#The_Wizardry_Compile...

swatcoder 3y ago

You can't automate perfect enforcement, but you can express a norm (as they have) and hold individual human contributors accountable for following it so that when a violation is discoved the humanms other contributions can be scrutinized and the human can be penalized/monitored/whatever going forward. People bicker over the quality of generated content vs human content, but accountability is actually the big challenge when granting agency to AI tools. There are many humans who might produce or contribute to a work, and when they violate norms it's accepted that we can hold the person individually accountable in some way or another -- perhaps by rejecting them, replacing them, or even suing them. Much the way mature financial systems depend on many features of legal and regulatory norms that crypto can'f deliver, most mature organizations depend on accountability that's not so easy to transfer to software agents. If there are a handful of code generators and they're granted autonomy/agency without an accountable vouchsafe, what do you do when they violate your norms? Perhaps you try to debug them, but what does that process look like for a black box instrument? How does that work when those services are hosted by third-parties who themselves reject accountability and who only expose a small interface for modification? Here, Gentoo dodges the problem entirely by saying effectively saying "we're not going to leave room for somebody to poiny to an AI tool as an excuse for errant work.. if they contribute, they need to take accountability as if the work is wholly and originally theirs by representing it as so." Contributors may violate that policy by using AI anyway, but they can't use it as an excuse/out for other violations because they now need to stay steadfast in their denial that AI was involved. So ultimately, this doesn't mean that generated code won't appear in Gentoo, but it makes sure contributed code is held to no lower a standard of accountability.