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

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:23:29 +0200
Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> wrote:

> > Many of the AI players scrape the web, and might well pull in training
> > data from web pages having a restrictive copyright.  The AI's output
> > might then be influenced by that restricted training data.   
> 
> True, but this is not different than a developer seeking the web for
> answers of his development problems, reading textbooks and/or reading 
> articles.

The difference I believe is that AI is still a computer program. It could,
in theory, copy something exactly as is, where copyright does matter.

If you read something and was able to rewrite it verbatim, you would be
subject to copyright infringement if what you read had limits on how you
could reproduce it.

> 
> Also, if someone publicly document something an any sort of media,
> it is expected that people will read, adquire knowledge from it and
> eventually materialize the acquired knowledge into something. This
> is fair use, and has some provision from Berne convention, although
> it may depend on each Country's specific laws.

You can learn from it, but it also comes down to how much you actually copy
from it.

> 
> On my view, if the trained data comes from lots of different
> places, as AI is actually a stochastic process that write
> code by predicting the next code words, if there's just one web 
> site with an specific pattern, the chances of getting exactly
> the same code are pretty low. It is a way more likely that humans
> would pick exactly the same code as written on his favorite
> textbook than an LLM feed with hundreds of thousands of web
> sites.

The issue I have with the above statement is, how would you know if the AI
copied something verbatim or not? Are you going to ask it? "Hey, AI, was
this code a direct copy of anything?" Would you trust its answer?

For a human to do the same, they would have to knowingly have done the copy.

-- Steve