Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Annotating patches containing AI-assisted code

[Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>]

On 05/08/2025 19:50, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 05:38:36PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
>> This proposal is pretty much followup/spinoff of the discussion currently
>> happening on LKML in one of the sub-threads of [1].
>>
>> This is not really about legal aspects of AI-generated code and patches, I
>> believe that'd be handled well handled well by LF, DCO, etc.
>>
>> My concern here is more "human to human", as in "if I need to talk to a
>> human that actually does understand the patch deeply enough, in context,
>> etc .. who is that?"
>>
>> I believe we need to at least settle on (and document) the way how to
>> express in patch (meta)data:
>>
>> - this patch has been assisted by LLM $X
>> - the human understanding the generated code is $Y
>>
>> We might just implicitly assume this to be the first person in the S-O-B
>> chain (which I personally don't think works for all scenarios, you can
>> have multiple people working on it, etc), but even in such case I believe
>> this needs to be clearly documented.
> 
> The above isn't really an AI problem though.
> 
> We already have folks sending "checkpatch fixes" which only make code
> less readable or "syzbot fixes" that shut up the warnings but are
> completely bogus otherwise.
> 
> Sure, folks sending "AI fixes" could (will?) be a growing problem, but
> tackling just the AI side of it is addressing one of the symptoms, not
> the underlying issue.


I think there is a important difference in process and in result between
using existing tools, like coccinelle, sparse or even checkpatch, and
AI-assisted coding.

For the first you still need to write actual code and since you are
writing it, most likely you will compile it. Even if people fix the
warnings, not the problems, they still at least write the code and thus
this filters at least people who never wrote C.

With AI you do not have to even write it. It will hallucinate, create
some sort of C code and you just send it. No need to compile it even!

We do see poor contributions based on reports from existing tools, like
you mentioned, but the AI can significantly increase the flood of poor
contributions, that's why I call this tool different. And that
difference deserves annotation and treating differently than checkpatch
or coccinelle fixes.

I am all for requirement of marking AI-assisted patches, so I can set up
my filters correctly and ignore GPL-4.0, GPL-6.0 or other hallucinated
code (I already saw such in Devicetree bindings subsystem).

Best regards,
Krzysztof