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

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Mon, 2025-08-11 at 14:46 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 08, 2025 at 10:31:27AM +0200, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:
> > 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!
> 
> Completely agreed, and furthermore, depending on how that AI was
> trained, those using that AI's output might have some difficulty
> meeting the requirements of the second portion of clause (a) of
> Developer's Certificate of Origin (DCO) 1.1: "I have the right to
> submit it under the open source license indicated in the file".

Just on the legality of this.  Under US Law, provided the output isn't
a derivative work (and all the suits over training data have so far
failed to prove that it is), copyright in an AI created piece of code,
actually doesn't exist because a non human entity can't legally hold
copyright of a work.  The US copyright office has actually issued this
opinion (huge 3 volume report):

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

But amazingly enough congress has a more succinct summary:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

But the bottom line is that pure AI generated code is effectively
uncopyrightable and therefore public domain which means anyone
definitely has the right to submit it to the kernel under the DCO.

I imagine this situation might be changed by legislation in the future
when people want to monetize AI output, but such a change can't be
retroactive, so for now we're OK legally to accept pure AI code with
the signoff of the submitter (and whatever AI annotation tags we come
up with).

Of course if you take AI output and modify it before submitting, then
the modifications do have copyright (provided a human made them).

Regards,

James