RFC: The Binutils and LLM generated patches

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Guys,

   Below is a revised version of the proposed policy on LLM generated
   patches.  As well as tweaking the wording in response to several
   peoples posts, I have also added a clause stating that a human must
   be involved in the patch submission process.  It occurred to me
   that without this caveat we might end up with bots submitting patches
   on their own with no human involvement at all and hence no copyright
   accountability.

Cheers
   Nick
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       The GNU Binutils project is currently
       *NOT* accepting LLM generated patches.

This is because the copyright status of LLM generated code is
currently unclear.  The policy applies to all parts of the GNU
Binutils including, but not limited to, code, documentation and
the testsuites.

There are however some exceptions to the policy:

   * Using LLMs to assist in writing code is fine providing that the
     LLM does not actually generate code.  So for example using an
     LLM for translations is OK.  So is using an LLM to provide text
     to speech services or to search for information, and so on.

   * LLM generated code that is not "legally significant"[1] is OK.
     As a rule of thumb, this means that trivial changes, such as
     spelling corrections, or small code formatting cleanups are fine.

Using an LLM to inspire or help create a patch might be OK.  It is a
question of whether LLM generated output eventually makes it into the
patch.  If it does, then the patch is unacceptable.  (Unless it can
be considered legally insignificant).

When submitting a non-legally-significant LLM generated change, it is
still necessary to clearly indicate the use of the LLM.  The
identification should take the form of a line starting with the
"Generated-By: " prefix which identifies the LLM used and a line
starting with "LLM-Query: " which shows the query given to the LLM.
For example:

   Generated-By: GNU-LLM version 1.0
   LLM-Query: Create a program to solve all GNU problems

In addition all patch submissions must involve a human.  Fully
automated patch submission, whether by a bot, a script, or some other
means is not acceptable.  This is because only humans can sign a
Developer Certificate of Origin or complete a FSF Copyright Assignment
and one of these needs to be in place for every submission.

The copyright assignment or DCO allows the GNU Binutils project to
trust that the submitter is the author of the submission, and that
they have the right under copyright law to make the submission.


Footnotes:

This policy is not set in stone.  It may well be reviewed and changed
in the future.

The policy uses the term "LLM generated" rather than "A.I. generated"
as the later could be misunderstood.  See [2] for more details.

The reason for requiring trivial LLM generated patches to be labelled
is to set a precedent.  In the future, if non-trivial patches become
acceptable, the standard of labelling LLM submissions should already
be in place.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant
[2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#ArtificialIntelligence