[QGIS-Developer] "Human In The Loop" Policy For AI/Tool-Assisted Contributions

[Laurențiu Nicola]

Hi,

At least in the US (and in my personal opinion, too), training an LLM is now thought to be transformative, thus fair use [1]. It's also not obvious that an LLM will reproduce ad-literam material from its training set [2].

> Transformativeness is a characteristic of such derivative works that makes them transcend, or place in a new light, the underlying works on which they are based. [3]

More so, it's becoming pretty clear that LLMs are more than -- to use a well-loved phrase -- "stochastic parrots". As a recent example, one built a C compiler [3] in Rust. I believe there used to be ~3 compilers that could build Linux, none of them written in Rust, and none of them translatable to Rust due to the particularities of the language. So while it might have had GCC in its training set, it couldn't have reproduced it.

And it's not like humans are perfect at avoiding copyrighted code. Try to write a binary search, or quick sort, or a Web Mercator conversion function that's not identical in spirit (at least) to a published version. Or look at how people used to copy-paste snippets from Stack Overflow before LLMs got popular.

The AI cat is out of the bag, and no policy trying to ban LLMs will put it back in. That's not to say that LLM-written contributions are always of high quality, quite the opposite. But LLMs have been getting better (writing even a toy compiler would have been a pipe dream just one year ago), so their quality is going to improve in the long run. And, as I mentioned before, putting LLM-based completions [5] in the same basket as the AI writing a whole new feature from scratch feels absurd.

Laurentiu

[1]: https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publications/afb0e10b/two-us-decisions-find-that-reproducing-works-to-train-large-language-models-is-fair-use
[2]: as opposed to feeding it nearby text from the original and asking for a completion like in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12546
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use
[4]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
[5]: not a great example, but https://youtu.be/hSFeDdZWHt0?t=179