Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

So essentially it’s “let us cover ourselves by saying it’s not allowed” and in practice that means not allowing code that a human thinks is AI generated code.

Universities have this issue too, despite many offering students and staff Grammarly (Gen AI) while also trying to ban Gen AI.

Sounds like a good idea to ensure developers are owning the code they submit rather than hiding behind "I don't know why it does that, ChatGPT wrote it".

Use AI if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell, and you can't defend the submission as your own, that's a problem.

> Use AI if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell, and you can't defend the submission as your own, that's a problem.

The actual policy is "don't use AI code generators"; don't try to weasel that into "use it if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell". That's effectively "it's only cheating if you get caught".

By way of analogy, Open Source projects also typically have policies (whether written or unwritten) that you only submit code you are legally allowed to submit. In theory, you could take a pile of proprietary reverse-engineered code that you have no license to, or a pile of code from another project that you aren't respecting the license of, and submit it anyway, and slap a `Signed-off-by` on it. Nothing will physically stop you, and people might not be able to tell. That doesn't make it OK.

The way I interpret it is that if you brainstorm using ChatGPT but write your own code using the ideas created in this step that would be fine, the reviewer wouldn't suspect the code of being AI generated because you've made sure it fits in with the project and actually works. The exact wording here is that they will reject changes they suspect of being AI generated, not that you can't have read anything AI generated in the process.

Getting AI to remind you of the libraries API is a fair bit different to having it generate 1000 lines of code you have hardly read before submitting.