AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

How does this not lead to a situation where no honest person can use any AI in their submissions? Surely pull requests that acknowledge AI tooling will be given significantly less attention, on the grounds that no one wants to read work that they know is written by AI.

Isn't that a good thing?

What, building systems where we’re specifically incentivised not to disclose ai use?

Submitting a PR also means you’re not submitting code copied from elsewhere without calling that out and ensuring license compatibility, we don’t refer to that as incentivizing lying about the origin of submitted code.

Fraud and misrepresentation are always options for contributors, at some point one needs to trust that they’re adhering to the rules that they agreed to adhere to.

If you removed all PR’s from the world that included copy-pasted code from stackoverflow that wasn’t mentioned, you’d be removing a LOT of PR’s. It’s not even considered a problem to copy and paste code from stackoverflow among most devs as long as you have reviewed it and modified it where necessary for your purposes. AI should be treated like that, if it’s not, people will just hide it and do it anyway.

Just because many developers are irresponsible in their approach to incorporating others’ works doesn’t change how intellectual property actually works, and any project that actually cares (whether open or proprietary) will ensure that people understand their responsibilities.

What you’re saying is essentially the code equivalent of “I found this image via Google search so of course it’s OK to put into a presentation, it’s on the web so that means I can use it.” This may not be looked at too hard for an investor presentation, but if you’re doing a high profile event like Apple’s WWDC you’ll learn quickly that all assets require clearance and “I found it on the web” won’t cut it—you’ll be made to use a different image or, if you actually present with the unlicensed image, you could be disciplined or outright fired for causing the company liability.

It’s amazing how many people in this industry think it’s OK to just wing this shit and even commit outright fraud just because it’s convenient.

Your argument breaks down when you realise that doing simple operations will result in the exact same code anyway. If I want to pull the first word from a string, whether I write it myself or copy and paste it from stack overflow we’re going to likely literally result in the exact same line of code. It’s not the same as an image from google images, because that image has a far higher chance of being unique.

You can talk about how we should act and be all high and mighty all you like, but it’s just burying your head in the sand about the reality of how code is written.

Also, technically, I never said this made it perfectly ok. It’s just that it’s the reality we live in and if we got rid of everyone doing it we’d have to fire 99% of programmers.

I’ve been in this industry 30+ years working for both very small companies and some of the largest. I thus have a pretty good understanding of the reality of how code is written, and you’re the one burying your head in the sand: Companies care about the provenance of what you write, and if you lie about that—whether explicitly or through omission—and it’s discovered, you’re going to be in a world of hurt since you may be exposing the company to liability and also violating your employer’s trust.