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

[Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>]

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.

-- 
Thanks,
Sasha