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

[Jan Heckman]

Some reading
<https://thenewstack.io/whats-wrong-with-generative-ai-driven-development-right-now/>
.

On Wed, Oct 9, 2024 at 9:11 AM ElPaso via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
wrote:

> Il 09/10/24 00:55, Greg Troxel via gdal-dev ha scritto:
> > ElPaso via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> writes:
> >
> >> I have read the discussion on lwn and I must say that I am more in
> >> line with the debian position.
> > My view is that code that comes out of generative AI should be viewed as
> > an improper derived work, and lacking adequate provenance/permission to
> > be added to an open source project, period.  As Even says, we could
> > relax this in the future.  It's very difficult to go back and remove
> > things.
>
>
> This may be true in some circumstances but that's not what I have seen
> so far using copilot wih GDAL: most of the times what it does for me
> much faster than me is cut-and-paste-replace or autocomplete taking code
> from other parts of GDAL or most frequently from other parts of the same
> file that I am editing, for example, when I was changing  ogrlineref to
> use gdalargumentparser, after manually changing the first part of the file
>
>
> https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/10147/files#diff-b906434b9e6a52aef54e0894ba43a7202290b1af4964cc5d9f1ec8ae7a1c4e15R1271
>
> the AI was very useful to autocomplete the other command line switches
> (one by one, not all of them), I had to change/edit almost everything
> but the scaffolding was there, the source of the autocomplete was
> obviously GDAL itself.
>
>
> Where is the copyright issue in this use case?
>
>
> Another situation where I find it useful is when writing tests: most of
> the times tests are boring boilerplate code to construct the test data,
> for example: the next line here was generate from the comment
>
>
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/58986/files#diff-8eebd3707bdc54c42ecd1a2abfca8f623a4c6a8c44c89f344a6762fe95a95059R4682
>
>
> also the checks were automatically generated after I entered the first
> couple (they are essentially a copy-paste), the source is QGIS itself.
>
>
> That said I agree that when an AI will be smart enough to be able to be
> "creative" (I know, hard to define what it exactly is, but a one-line
> cut-paste-replace from the same code base certainly isn't) we will have
> a problem to define who/what is the author of the code.
>
>
> Perhaps we could find a way to allow the limited use of AI tools as
> autocompleters as long as the source of the generated material is
> obviously the code base itself (for instance when using the GDAL API).
>
>
> --
> Alessandro Pasotti
> w3: www.itopen.it
>
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