On Wed, Sep 02, 2026 at 09:09:59AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > Thanks for the review! > > On 9/2/26 03:38, Alistair Francis wrote: > > > +Prohibited use of AI > > > +'''''''''''''''''''' > > > + > > > +The following items **MUST** be written by humans: > > > + > > > +- cover letters and commit messages > > > + > > > +- responses to reviewer comments > > > + > > > +- issue descriptions or comments > > > + > > > +Light copy editing of human-written text with an AI is allowed. > > > > What about translations? Not everyone can write English well and I see > > translations being useful. > > Difficult choice. I can see that it's useful, but we've never been > hardliners for English grammar, and translation may cause agent-ese to slip > in. I am not a native speaker but I wouldn't use this possibility, so I'm > not the best person to decide.
Yep, my view is that we generally accept patches written with whatever level of English a contributor has. Perfection is an explicit non-goal. Having a machine (AI or not) rewrite text to "polish" the English will always have the danger of changing the meaning/intet. For reviewers it is valuable to see the contributors original "thinking", such that if something is unclear/unpolished a human-to-human discussion & decision can clarify & improve that text. This all, however, assumes the contributor has some basic level of English skill. That is not a given. There are doubtless contributors who will have heavily used automated machine translation, even before AI, when interacting with projects. Communication may be more challenging for both sides in this scenario, but these contributors can still be valuable to the project so should be accommodated. IOW, I would not want to exclude them by having a hard rule against use of AI translation, as it can be better than pre-AI translation tools they might have otherwise used in the past. TL;DR: we do not want AI to be the original author of the cover letters and commit messages. If the contributor can only author a cover letter / commit message in their native language, however, IMHO it is acceptable to use any translation tool to covert that to English (whether that tool is AI based or not). We should accept the imperfection / risk of changes in semantics here. With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com ~~ https://hachyderm.io/@berrange :| |: https://libvirt.org ~~ https://entangle-photo.org :| |: https://pixelfed.art/berrange ~~ https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
