[QGIS-Developer] Floating an idea: ban AI based contributed from non-core developers?

[Greg Troxel]

Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> I'd like to float an idea for discussion: that we explicitly block all AI
> based contributions from non-core developers.
>
> I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I personally now think that we
> need to further tighten our AI policy. To be clear upfront, I am not
> approaching this from societal or environmental perspectives, but rather

Well, I'm not happy about RAM and disk prices :-)

> from my own direct experience with using and testing these tools. In my
> direct experience, regardless of the tool used (including Claude, gemini,
> etc), the results are NOT reliable in all situations. There's still massive
> amounts of hallucinations, missteps, convoluted and unstable code generated.

In 1 out of 1 LLM PRs I reviewed (in a project that has the same Free
Software norms, but in a different technical field), the PR was poor
quality.  It turned out to be technically wrong, and it had lots of
wordy but mostly not-really-content commentary.  That's a certified
anecdatum!

> So, as a practical way to protect the QGIS application and its users, I
> think we could refine our AI policy to be "contributions using AI tools for
> development are banned for all non-core contributors".
>
> By wording things this way, we don't explicitly prevent AI driven
> development from all contributors. Rather we limit it to the subset of
> contributors who we've formally recognised as having an extensive
> understanding of QGIS code, architectural design and development practices.
> These contributors are those who *do* have the skills required to
> critically analyse the output of LLMs and guide them when the results they
> give are unsuitable.

I strongly support your proposal as an incremental change.  It will
avoid a lot of LLM submissions, while (assuming for the moment that any
LLM use is ok, ethically, legally, useful on balance etc.) giving room
for understanding/experimenting among people that already have knowledge
and already have human-to-human working relationships.

I remain skeptical of AI/LLM even from core contributors, but I suspect
that will be self-policing or at least on balance (understanding about
policy, benefits of code) worth the cognitive load in review/discussion.

Greg