AI Contribution Policy

[sockbot]

I noticed that this project does not have an AI contribution policy and wanted to flesh out a few discussion points for the project maintainers and contributors.

I think the 3 key issues we should consider in the policy are:

1. Contributor behavior & incentives - asymmetrical effort, spam, AI use disclosure
2. Code quality & maintainability, including security - contributor and reviewer understanding
3. Licensing & legal risk - Unclear provenance of generated code, attribution ambiguity

One strategy I would recommend is looking at how some other large FLOSS project policies; not only to copy their policy wordings (if In alignment with goals), but also to align with those projects in sharing legal risk.

I think considering how the Linux kernel generated content policy addresses the above 3 issues is a good starting point: https://docs.kernel.org/process/generated-content.html

[bunnie]

I kind of like Fedora's guidelines on this https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/council-policy-proposal-policy-on-ai-assisted-contributions/

My general take is:

• Contributions must come from a human who, in the end, vouches for the entirety of their contribution. This is a legal requirement as generally courts have ruled that copyrights can only be assigned to humans (not even monkeys can hold a copyright), and the licenses all work based on copyright.
• Assigning contributions to a human also means liability follows the human. While the licenses confer a no-warranty clause, there is a reputational liability implicit in a human's contributions, and as maintainer if you resort to the excuse "the machine made me do it" I'm much less likely to spend time reviewing/incorporating your changes.
• Contributions always need to be modular, reviewable, and clearly explainable. Huge monoliths of PRs will be rejected (unless there is some well-understood reason for it, e.g. we have agreed as a community to change our code formatting, refactor an API, or bump some version pins that impact a lot of crates).
• Time is finite and attention is a scant resource. If AI makes you super productive, great! Unfortunately that means I'm going to be a bottleneck. However, you can have your AI maintain a fork for you with your new-found super-productivity powers.