New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD’s licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.
Ok but how is anyone meant to know if you generated your docstrings using copilot?
How do they know that you wrote it yourself and didn’t just steal it?
This is a rule to protect themselves. If there is ever a case around this, they can push the blame to the person that committed the code for breaking that rule.
This is the only reason rules exist, not to stop people doing a thing but to be able to enforce or defect responsibility when they do.
I mean, generally rules at least are to strongly discourage people from doing a thing, or to lead to things that WOULD prevent people from doing a thing.
A purely conceptual rule by itself would not magically stop someone from doing a thing, but that’s kind of a weird way to think about it.
I’m saddened to use this phrase but it is literally virtue signalling. They have no way of knowing lmao
It’s actually simple to detect: if the code sucks or is written by a bad programmer, and the docstrings are perfect, it’s AI. I’ve seen this more than once and it never fails.
I’m confused, do people really use copilot to write the whole thing and ship it without re reading?
So your results are biased, because you’re not going to see the decent programmers who are just using it to take mundane tasks off their back (like generating boilerplate functions) while staying in control of the logic. You’re only ever going to catch the noobs trying to cheat without fully understanding what it is they’re doing.
It’s also probably to make things slightly simpler from a legal perspective.
Because they’ll be shit?
Docstrings based on the method signature and literal contents of a method or class are completely pointless, and that’s all copilot can do. It can’t Intuit anything that docstrings are actually there for.
Definitely not my experience. With a well structured code base it can be pretty uncanny. I think it’s context is limited to files that are currently opened in the editor, so that may be your issue if you’re coding with just one file open?
GitHub Copilot introduced a new keyword a little while ago, “@workspace”, where it can see everything in your project. The code it generates uses all your own functions and variables in your libraries and it figures out how to use them correctly.
There was one time where I totally went “WTF”, because it spat out Python. In a C++ project. But those kind of hallucinations are getting more and more rare. The more code you write, the better it gets. It really does become sort of like a “Copilot”, sitting there coding alongside you. The mistake people make is assuming it’s going to come up with ideas and algorithms for them without spending any mental energy at all.
I’m not trying to shill. I’m not a programmer by trade. Just a hobbyist who started on QBasic in the ancient times. But I’ve been trying to learn it off and on for the past 30 years, and I’ve never learned so much and had so much fun as in the last 1.5 with AI help. I can just think of stuff to do, and shit will just flow out now.
Lots of stupid people asking “how would they know?”
That’s not the fucking point. The point is that if they catch you they can block future commits and review your past commits for poor quality code. They’re setting a quality standard, and establishing consequences for violating it.
If your AI generated code isn’t setting off red flags, you’re probably fine, but if something stupid slips through and the maintainers believe it to be the result of Generative AI, they will remove your code from the codebase and you from the project.
It’s like laws against weapons. If you have a concealed gun on your person and enter a public school, chances are that nobody will know and you’ll get away with it over and over again. But if anyone ever notices, you’re going to jail, you’re getting permanently trespassed from school grounds, and you’re probably not going to be allowed to own guns for a while.
And, it’s a message to everyone else quietly breaking the rules that they have something to lose if they don’t stop.
Lots of stupid people asking “how would they know?”
That’s not the fucking point.
Okay, easy there, Chief. We were just trying to figure out how it worked. Sorry.
It was a fair question, but this is just going to turn out like universities failing or expelling people for alleged AI content in papers.
They can’t prove it. They try to use AI tools to prove it, but those same tools will say a thesis paper from a decade ago is also AI generated. Pretty sure I saw a story of a professor accusing someone based off a tool having his own past paper fail the same tool
Short of an admission of guilt, it’s a witch hunt.
This is a good move for international open source projects, with multiple lawsuits in multiple countries around the globe currently ongoing, the intellectual property nature of code made using AI isn’t really secure enough to open yourself up to the liability.
I’ve done the same internally at our company. You’re free to use whatever tool you want but if the tool you use spits out copyrighted code, and the law eventually has decided that model users instead of model trainers are liable for model output, then that’s on you buddy.
So proud of you NetBSD, this is why I sponsor you, slam dunk for the future. I’m working on a NetBSD hardening script and Rice as we speak, great OS with some fantastically valuable niche applications and I think, a new broad approach I’m cooking up, a University Edition. I did hardening for all the other BSD, I saved the best for last!
[EDIT 5/16/2024 15:04 GMT -7] NetBSD got Odin lang support yesterday. That totally seals the NetBSD deal for me if I can come up with something cool for my workstation with Odin.
If you would like to vote on whether, or by what year, AI will be in the Linux Kernel on Infosec.space:
I was hoping they ban it because it’s shit, but banning it for copyright reasons is fine too.
