Hi Aaron, On Thu, 2025-12-11 at 23:35 -0500, Aaron Merey wrote: > I'd like to propose an elfutils policy for contributions containing > content generated by LLM or AI tools (AI-assisted contributions). A > written policy will help clarify for contributors whether elfutils > accepts AI-assisted contributions and whether any special procedures > apply.
I think it would be good to differentiate between LLM generated contributions and [AI] tool assisted contributions. The first seems easy to define and is about whether or not to accept such generated patches. While the later seems a very broad topic that mostly is what tools a developer might use personally, most of which we don't need a policy for. > There isn't a consensus across major open source projects on whether > AI-assisted contributions should be allowed. For example, Binutils > [1], Gentoo [2], and man-pages [3] have adopted policies rejecting > most or all AI-assisted contributions. There have also been discussions by glibc and gcc to adopt a similar policy as binutils has on LLM Generated Content. > Fedora [4] and the Linux Foundation [5] have policies permitting the > use of AI-assisted contributions. Contributors are expected to > disclose the use of any AI tools and take responsibility for the > contribution's quality and license compatibility. The Fedora one is for a large part not about using AI for code contributions. The Linux Foundation one lets each developer try to figure out if there are (legal) issues or not. Both feel like they are not really giving any real guidance but let every individual try to figure it out themselves. > In my opinion, elfutils should permit AI-assisted contributions. As > for specific policies, I suggest the following. > > (1) AI-assisted contributions should include a disclosure that some or > all of the contribution was generated using an AI tool. The git > commit tag "Assisted-by:" has been adopted for this purpose by Fedora, > for instance. I think this is too weak. The tag or comment should at least explain how to replicate the generated content. Which isn't very practical with the current generation of LLM chatbots. Or probably even impossible. I do think it is appropriate for deterministic tooling though, so as to have a recipe to replicate specific code changes. > (2) AI-assisted contributions should otherwise be treated like any > other contribution. The contributor vouches for the quality of their > contribution and verifies license compatibility with their DCO > "Signed-off-by:" tag while reviewers evaluate the technical merits of > the contribution. Yes, but I think this just says no such contributions can have a Signed-off-by tag since, at least for LLM chatbot like generated patches, have unclear copyright status and so a contributor cannot > (3) Maintainers may reject contributions at their discretion. > Rejection can occur if a contribution is unnecessary, low quality, or > creates an excessive review burden, for example. Maintainer > discretion to accept or refuse a contribution has always applied, but > it may be worth stating this in the policy. Yes, this is good. > I'm interested in hearing what others think about this. Elfutils has > already accepted AI-assisted contributions. But was that a good idea? Or did that just cause a lot of extra review time because of the unclear provenance of those contributions? > This proposal formalizes > the status quo and is broadly aligned with the policies of Fedora and > the Linux Foundation. I would lean the other way and adopt a simple policy like the rest of the core toolchain projects are adopting to reject LLM generated contributions for which the provenance cannot be determined (because the training corpus and/or algorithm is unknown). > [1] https://sourceware.org/binutils/wiki/LLM_Generated_Content > [2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy > [3] > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING.d/ai > [4] > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/policy/ai-contribution-policy/ > [5] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai Cheers, Mark
