Re: Current policy on AI-generated code in NumPy

> Write out here what you would want a PR author to provide.

Please let me honk in from philosophy/science/psychology to reiterate,

"The prompts, Boss, the prompts!"

Don't you think that some sample at least would add some conviction that 
a human was involved?

Case in point is mrdope, who I imagine could be a person talking through 
an LLM out of shyness, overproductivity syndrome, or as an experiment. 
Per my comment:

> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/30828 [1].
> Is the work the product of ai? Yes, but the author claims to have 
> verified the code. Is the author ai or not? Should we proceed with the 
> PR?
> Matti
> 
> The interactions ... have the flat agreeableness of an LLM. mrdope, are 
> you hear and clear? :-)

Bill

-- 

https://github.com/phobrain/phobrain

"Don't dope me, I'm just the racehorse here."

On 2026-02-14 09:38, Robert Kern via NumPy-Discussion wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 12:17 PM Matthew Brett 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 9:45 PM Robert Kern <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2026 at 6:26 PM Matthew Brett via NumPy-Discussion 
>>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Just to clarify - in case it wasn't clear, what I'm floating as a 
>>>> proposal, would be something like this, as a message to PR authors:
>>>> 
>>>> Please specify one of these:
>>>> 
>>>> 1) I wrote this code myself, without looking at significant 
>>>> AI-generated code OR
>>>> 2) The code contains AI-generated content, but the AI-generated code 
>>>> is sufficiently trivial that it cannot reasonably be subject to 
>>>> copyright OR
>>>> 3) There is non-trivial AI-generated code in this PR, and I have 
>>>> documented my searches to confirm that no parts of the code are 
>>>> subject to existing copyright.
>>>> 
>>>> So - the burden for the reviewer is just to confirm, in case 3, that 
>>>> the author has documented their searches.   We take the word of the 
>>>> contributor for the option they have chosen.   Obviously, the 
>>>> documentation requirement of case 3 is somewhat of a burden for the 
>>>> contributor, and may therefore encourage them to write the code 
>>>> themselves, to avoid that burden.  That might not be a bad thing, 
>>>> long term, for the project, and it seems reasonable to me as some 
>>>> defence against copyright violation, and a message that the project 
>>>> cares about such violation.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> For Case 3, I would love to see an example of the search that you 
>>> would accept. If you could take a recent PR (human or AI, doesn't 
>>> really matter for this purpose), and show the search that would 
>>> satisfy you, that would go a long way towards clarifying what you are 
>>> asking for here. We'd need a worked example or two before adopting 
>>> this policy because if I don't know what you are asking for, no new 
>>> contributor will, either.
>> 
>> Yes, that's a reasonable request.   But how do you think I should
>> proceed?   Make an issue on Numpy, and start drafting?   Start another
>> email thread?  Or a Discourse / Scientific Python thread?
> 
> Just here should be fine. Take an existing PR that has copyrightable 
> content (e.g. an entire new function or three, each more than ~10 
> lines, not just many one-line updates scattered around; the most 
> interesting ones would be those that implement a known algorithm). Do 
> the code search that would satisfy you. Write out here what you would 
> want a PR author to provide.
> --
> Robert Kern
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Links:
------
[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/30828

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