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

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 01:50:57PM -0400, 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.

Perfect, let's document a policy and kill two birds with one stone then.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart