Banning LLM-generated or assisted contributions to the GNU C Library

[Andrew Pinski]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 5:10 AM Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
>
> * Andreas K. Huettel:
>
> > Dear all,
> >
> > some time ago Gentoo Linux debated and decided an "AI Policy"
> > [1]. Its verbatim text is
> >
> >> It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that
> >> has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing
> >> artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should
> >> a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright,
> >> ethical and quality concerns.
> >
> > I would like to propose that the GNU C Library adopts a similar policy.
> >
> > While I see the point of all rationales given in the Gentoo decision
> > [1], my personal main drive is quality control and responsibility.
> >
> > We are not talking about programming a mobile phone tower defense
> > game here.  We are however talking about code that is used in
> > millions of devices worldwide in mission-critical and
> > security-critical applications.
> >
> > And for programming that, AI technology is not ready yet.
>
> > [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
>
> I think that should be up to the submitter.  The line can get really
> murky.  The Gentoo policy appears to ban certain assistive
> technologies, which I think is not appropriate at all.  I find it very
> hard to come up with a policy that is not as arbitrary as requiring
> that source code is edited with Emacs only.

I disagree that it bans `certain assistive technologies`. And I
disagree with the notion that it is arbitrary at all.

>
> We could add some clarifications to the contribution guidelines,
> although they are already quite long.

NO. We should just ban AI assistive code generation in general and not
carve out any exceptions. We should also ban it for commit messages
too.
AI assistive code generation (include white space fixes) is broken
code and might include non-GPL complaint code and it makes it harder
for the submitter to even know if they can submit it. Banning it right
off prevents this mess from happening in the first place.

Thanks,
Andrew

>
> * Code that is auto-generated should be clearly labeled as such.  If
>   possible, auto-generated code should be regenerated at build time.
>
> * If a patch contains auto-generated code, the submitter's review of
>   that code does not count as peer review.
>
> But we should find something that we can delete from the policy
> instead before adding new things.