AI Contributions

[duncanbeevers]

AI-assisted and AI-initiated contributions are becoming increasingly prevalent across the Open Source world.
I haven't seen any official guidance within this project around expectations for this flavor of contribution, and thought it might be prudent to get out ahead of the deluge.

In particular, I would like to provide clear guidance for contributors regarding:

• Are AI-assisted contributions welcome, and if so, how, and to whom are they attributed?
• Are AI-initiated contributions welcome, and if so, how, and to whom, are they attributed?
• Are there guidelines around how AI agents present and conduct themselves?
  • How does the Code-of-Conduct apply to AI agents?
  • Are AI agents expected to identify themselves as such?
  • Are AI agents expected to indicate to whom they are beholden? Are driverless contributions accepted?

Some starting guidelines I'd personally like to see:

• AI agents should not use human or near-human avatars
• AI agents should not use false information in their bios
• AI agents should indicate their nature in their PR descriptions
• AI agents should indicate who are their operators.
• AI-submitted PRs should not be merged until their operators have been explicitly-engaged, and both operators and repository owners have indicated they understand the agentic nature of the contribution.

[jmertic]

There is an existing LF policy that OpenAPI should leverage, and can build upon if needed....

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai

[karenetheridge]

FWIW, I have recently added this boilerplate to READMEs of open source work that are primarily written/maintained by me:

I will not accept AI-generated or AI-assisted contributions unless the nature of the AI assistance is clearly identified with the pull request. Ignoring this request will result in a ban of future contributions to any of my work.

i.e. you can still use AI, but I require full disclosure.

[miqui]

This is a great note @karenetheridge

[lornajane]

I think we're taking about two things here. One is an AI-assisted review and update of the spec, yes let's do that but perhaps in another thread? The other is a general AI policy which looking at my other notifications we may already be late with .

I'm hugely in favour of AI assisted human contributions and reviews, but I would like to have guardrails about disclosure and I expect the humans to be knowledgeable and responsive to follow-ups. I'm not super keen on AI-originated work but perhaps I just haven't seen good contributions from that approach yet.

We do already have some minimum account age settings in our repositories which I hope will also help with drive-by inputs from either species.

Do we have consensus about the sort of guardrails we'd like in place?

[handrews]

Created #5221 for using LLMs on 3.2.1. I'll hide my comments here to discourage further replies in this thread.