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That would imply it'd be fine for me to contribute AI assisted work if I did so politely and honestly. I just need to respect the maintainer's time and I'm gold

That would imply it'd be fine for me to contribute AI assisted work if I did so politely and honestly. I just need to respect the maintainer's time and I'm golden, right? That's not what the policy says, is it? It's a shame, really. I had some GCC patches under development, and now I simply won't submit them. Not the first time I ended up sitting on perfectly good patches after running smack into such a policy either.

bigfishrunning 3mo ago
This policy means that the GCC maintainers have defined "perfectly good" differently then you have.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Here's to hoping LLVM will define it differently.
  - jcranmer 3mo ago
    LLVM defined its AI policy several months ago: https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html (There's already some consternation that it's too permissive.)
    - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
      Reasonable policy. It's fine to make it less permissive on the basis of quality. It's the "AI, therefore slop" prejudice that's problematic.
- olalonde 3mo ago
  I think they meant it as "indistinguishable from a human contribution".
overgard 3mo ago
The thing they want is clear legal standing. If your submission is majority LLM generated, you can't really confirm that "your" code isn't a copy of something in the training set that has an incompatible license (or a clear copyright violation). That might not be a big deal for some projects, but being this is GNU and their entire identity is centered around free software and licensing, it's kind of a big deal to them.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- olalonde 3mo ago
  That's just not an issue in practice. All major AI labs match generated code against their training data to prevent outputting verbatim copies. They're so confident they won't output copyrighted code that they offer copyright indemnification to paid users.
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    They do? Last I remember microsoft's license for copilot was saying that any copyright violation is on the user and they were disclaiming all responsibility (which would probably not hold up in court).
    - olalonde 3mo ago
      Yes, they do. > Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot... > Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result. https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-api-improvements https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap... > Output indemnity. OpenAI’s indemnification obligations to Enterprise customers under the Agreement include claims that Customer’s use or distribution of Output infringes a third party’s intellectual property right. https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/ https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/
LtWorf 3mo ago
> I had some GCC patches under development, and now I simply won't submit them. Of course, of course… I also had found a proof to fermat's last theorem that fits in a single page but I'm not publishing it as well :D
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  I had human authored GCC patches that added Linux system call builtins to GCC. I was in the middle of learning how GCC's code generation worked when my laptop fell onto the floor and my hard drive crashed, leading to the loss of the work. This was years ago, and you can even find some emails from me on the mailing list defending the feature. AI helped me successfully restart that patch set, and take it much further than I got on my first try. Once I got that merged and perfected the contribution process, I was also planning to work on some of the feature requests that I posted on GCC's bugzilla, mainly an analyzer feature for tagged unions in C that verifies field accesses match their associated tags, and also a way to rename the "internal" symbols that GCC generates purely for aesthetic reasons. Looks like all that stuff is gone now. Maybe it's for the best. Attempting to contribute to GNU projects hasn't exactly been a pleasant experience.
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Can't you already do that with inline assembly pretty easily?
    - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
      You generally don't have to, the Linux system calls are in the standard library anyway. Having GCC builtins for them is of questionable utility at best. Even if the GP poster submitted these patches that may or may not exist, I'm not sure they would ever get merged.

bigfishrunning 3mo ago

This policy means that the GCC maintainers have defined "perfectly good" differently then you have.

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
Here's to hoping LLVM will define it differently.
- jcranmer 3mo ago
  LLVM defined its AI policy several months ago: https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html (There's already some consternation that it's too permissive.)
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Reasonable policy. It's fine to make it less permissive on the basis of quality. It's the "AI, therefore slop" prejudice that's problematic.
olalonde 3mo ago
I think they meant it as "indistinguishable from a human contribution".

overgard 3mo ago

The thing they want is clear legal standing. If your submission is majority LLM generated, you can't really confirm that "your" code isn't a copy of something in the training set that has an incompatible license (or a clear copyright violation). That might not be a big deal for some projects, but being this is GNU and their entire identity is centered around free software and licensing, it's kind of a big deal to them.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
olalonde 3mo ago
That's just not an issue in practice. All major AI labs match generated code against their training data to prevent outputting verbatim copies. They're so confident they won't output copyrighted code that they offer copyright indemnification to paid users.
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  They do? Last I remember microsoft's license for copilot was saying that any copyright violation is on the user and they were disclaiming all responsibility (which would probably not hold up in court).
  - olalonde 3mo ago
    Yes, they do. > Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot... > Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result. https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-api-improvements https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap... > Output indemnity. OpenAI’s indemnification obligations to Enterprise customers under the Agreement include claims that Customer’s use or distribution of Output infringes a third party’s intellectual property right. https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/ https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/

LtWorf 3mo ago

> I had some GCC patches under development, and now I simply won't submit them. Of course, of course… I also had found a proof to fermat's last theorem that fits in a single page but I'm not publishing it as well :D

matheusmoreira 3mo ago
I had human authored GCC patches that added Linux system call builtins to GCC. I was in the middle of learning how GCC's code generation worked when my laptop fell onto the floor and my hard drive crashed, leading to the loss of the work. This was years ago, and you can even find some emails from me on the mailing list defending the feature. AI helped me successfully restart that patch set, and take it much further than I got on my first try. Once I got that merged and perfected the contribution process, I was also planning to work on some of the feature requests that I posted on GCC's bugzilla, mainly an analyzer feature for tagged unions in C that verifies field accesses match their associated tags, and also a way to rename the "internal" symbols that GCC generates purely for aesthetic reasons. Looks like all that stuff is gone now. Maybe it's for the best. Attempting to contribute to GNU projects hasn't exactly been a pleasant experience.
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Can't you already do that with inline assembly pretty easily?
  - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    You generally don't have to, the Linux system calls are in the standard library anyway. Having GCC builtins for them is of questionable utility at best. Even if the GP poster submitted these patches that may or may not exist, I'm not sure they would ever get merged.