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

[Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.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.

I agree, I think Jiri's proposal is broader than AI - rather it is about
attribution and (in my view CoC-specific) consequences of incorrect
attribution.

However, I think a product of a broader discussion on AI is the production
of a general kernel AI policy which would cover off how attribution would
look _in that case_.

Perhaps a separate document that speaks to attribution as a whole would
also be appropriate?

For the CoC enforcement stuff, I think that is a seperate but possibly
related topic in itself.

Cheers, Lorenzo