[gdal-dev] Tightening AI based submission policy

[Greg Troxel]

Michael Sumner via gdal-dev <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> I don't understand if the llm generated material is too poor (easy to
> ignore/fix, especially by using llms), or if the opposittion is to llm
> generators themselves ideologically (an politlically, climate change and
> capitalism and fasciism etc), and I think these things are conflated
> somewhat.

I think there are three issues, super roughly
  - "dealing with LLM text"
  - "LLM text in the project is bad for the project's social structure"
  - "a broad culture of LLM use is bad for society".  
and I think you are referring the the third as "ideological".  However,
I think most of the concerns are reachable from the first two parts
alone.

With 'dealing with', there are two problems, and pro-LLM people have
not, to my knowledge, made any significant argument/approach to fix
them.

One is that LLM-wielders produce bits that need maintainer attention at
a high rate with much less effort.

The biggest one in my view is that LLM-generated submissions are overly
verbose and both appear plausible and are often subtly wrong.  The
review burden for such a subsmission is vastly higher than for a PR
created soley by a (competent) human.  Hard to estimate, but 10-20x as
hard seems about right.  To "fix" an LLM submission, it needs to be
understood by a human, the subtle bugs removed, and rewrittento be as
conscise as a human (who is qualified to work on the codebase in
question) would make it.

The above leads to "no LLM text in what is submitted".