[gdal-dev] Proposed RFC 8 amendment regarding (prohibited use of) generative AI tools

[Paul Harwood]

IANAL - however I have looked at a lot of these things in my time.

The phrase "use of generative AI tools to contribute copyrighted material
is prohibited" is ambiguous (and actually nugatory):

- for clarity - it should say that it is prohibited to use such tools to
contribute *to the project* otherwise you are making a general
statement about the law.

- the contribution of (unattributed) copyright code is (presumable)
forbidden regardless of the tools and anyway - that provides a loophole
that anyone can say "I was not contributing copyright code - I had a
reasonable lack of awareness of the status of the code" which is anyway the
grey area you are addressing. It should probably say that the use of
generative AI tools is prohibited without reference to rights of the case.

- The user has a great deal of uncertainty about whether they are using GAI
- when using VS it makes a lot of code suggestions. I do not know whether
they are created by GAI.

Therefore - I might suggest something more like :

"the intentional use of generative AI tools to contribute to the GDAL
project is prohibited"

Paul

On Tue, 8 Oct 2024 at 08:42, Laurențiu Nicola via gdal-dev <
gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> > At the moment I am using copilot as a cut-and-paste on steroids and it
> > has improved my efficiency, to me it is no different than copying and
> > pasting from another file in the GDAL source code or going to SO to
> > search how to write a complex recursive lambda implementation in C++11,
> > cut the example and paste in GDAL. Note that in both cases the
> > copied/pasted or generated code will need careful review and adaptations.
>
> I think it's worth mentioning that code taken from SO is licensed under
> CC-BY-SA, so it needs at least proper attribution. Looking at the GDAL
> codebase, I counted about 21 stackoverflow.com URLs, the vast majority of
> those added by Even, according to git blame. So either Even is almost the
> only GDAL contributor that uses Stack Overflow, or this might already be a
> problem.
>
> Not to mention that a link in the source code might not be sufficient for
> attribution, especially if you're shipping binaries etc.
>
> Laurentiu
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