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

[Paul Harwood]

While I am at it - the stuff about "changes that are not subject to
copyright law" is meaningless - copyright applies to content and not to
changes and I doubt there is any content on GDAL that is NOT subject to
copyright law.

I would humbly suggest that the question is more about whether
"corrections" such as spelling and grammar (and possible syntax and style
in code) are "generative".

I would suggest that the following might be better

"the use of AI to make corrections such as fixing spelling, grammar, syntax
and style mistakes may be acceptable"

I have left the "may" in there but I would be happier with it "is
acceptable" - "may" is a worrying word.

On Tue, 8 Oct 2024 at 10:31, Paul Harwood <runette at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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