doc/contributions/: Add guidelines severely restricting use of AI for contributing

This policy has been derived from Gentoo.  I added a requirement that
use of AI is disclosed.  And changes resulting from said use should be
disclosed in detail.  Also, I left a note saying we'll reject
non-negligible use of AI, which is a bit of an escape allowing us to
just say "too much".

Link: <https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/>
Link: <https://petri.com/ai-coding-tools-rising-software-defects/>
Link: <https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/ai-coding-tools-may-produce-worse-software-.html>
Link: <https://carbonate.dev/blog/posts/the-ai-code-quality-crisis>
Cc: Iker Pedrosa <ipedrosa@redhat.com>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Signed-off-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>

diff --git a/doc/contributions/ai.txt b/doc/contributions/ai.txt
new file mode 100644 (file)
index 0000000..e52e1ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/contributions/ai.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+Name
+       AI - artificial intelligence policy
+
+Description
+       It is expressly forbidden to contribute to this project any
+       content that has been created with non-trivial assistance of
+       AI tools.
+
+       The use of AI tools should be minimal, limited to reviewing
+       a contribution once it's almost finished.  Use of AI tools in
+       the process of a contribution should be disclosed explicitly and
+       clearly.  If such use of AI tools resulted in changing the
+       contribution in any way --for example, if an AI-based static
+       analyzer detected a bug, which was fixed before sending the
+       contribution--, this should be disclosed explicitly with more
+       detail.
+
+    Exceptions
+       As an exception to the above, AI assistive tools which don't
+       have any influence on the contribution other than enabling the
+       contributor to work with their computer (e.g., screen reader,
+       text to speech) --where the contributor verifies the output to
+       the best of their ability-- are allowed, and the contributor
+       need not disclose their use.
+
+    Concerns
+       Copyright concerns.
+               At this point, the regulations concerning copyright of
+               generated contents are still emerging worldwide.  Using
+               such material could pose a danger of copyright
+               violations, but it could also weaken claims to copyright
+               and void the guarantees given by copyleft licensing.
+
+       Quality concerns.
+               Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly
+               looking, but meaningless content.  They pose both the
+               risk of lowering the quality of a project, and of
+               requiring an unfair human effort from contributors and
+               maintainers to review contributions and detect the
+               mistakes resulting from the use of AI.
+
+       Ethical concerns.
+               The business side of AI boom is creating serious ethical
+               concerns.  Among them:
+
+               -  Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in
+                  blatant copyright violations to train their models.
+               -  Their operations are causing concerns about the huge
+                  use of energy, water, and other natural resources.
+               -  The advertising and use of AI models has caused
+                  a significant harm to employees and reduction of
+                  service quality.
+               -  LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam
+                  efforts.
+
+Caveats
+       This policy can be revisited, should a case be made over such
+       a tool that does not pose copyright, quality, or ethical
+       concerns.
+
+       We will reject patches were the use of AI is not tangential.
+
+Copyright
+       Text derived from --but different than-- the Gentoo project
+       AI policy
+       <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy>.
+
+       SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0

diff --git a/doc/contributions/introduction.md b/doc/contributions/introduction.md
index bb42392260efb552dc52ba2acbdf9e09d051921e..74625fa59542b37fc8b150618e7186476a521162 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/contributions/introduction.md
+++ b/doc/contributions/introduction.md
@@ -69,6 +69,7 @@ in the output of the previous step
 Additionally, you should also check the following internal guidelines to
 understand the project's development model:
 
+* [Use of AI](ai.md)
 * [Build & install](build_install.md)
 * [Coding style](coding_style.md)
 * [Tests](tests.md)