Re: GR -- Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

Legally, that changes things a lot, usually.

Human and LLM learning are called the same more like a funny
coincidence of the language rather than by any similarity.

A human needs to see 0 quicksort implementations to be able to do it,
an LLM needs to see millions of them. The process is completely
different and I think these comparisons are not helpful to the
discussion.

Il giorno ven 20 feb 2026 alle ore 20:54 Theodore Tso <[email protected]>
ha scritto:
>
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 08:26:08PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > As a made-up example, see each commit in
> > https://github.com/lnussbaum/llm-refactor-example/commits/main/ :
> > the caesar_cipher() implementation introduced in the last commit can
> > probably be found in the training data.
>
> As another hypothetical thought experiment, suppose the problem is to
> optimize a program which has a bubble sort, and a human programmer is
> asked to optimize it by replacing it with a quick sort.
>
> There are only so many different ways to code the quick sort algorithm
> in C, and it's likely that the human being might even be vaguely
> remembering how they saw it done in some non-free source code (for
> example, in Sedgewick's Algorithms book) and perhaps, subconsciously
> reproduced it from some non-free source that they ocne saw.
>
> Would that be problematic?  I very much doubt it, even if it looked
> frighteningly similar to the one found in AT&T's proprietary Unix
> code.
>
> Now replace "a human being" with "an LLM".  How does this change the
> calculus?
>
>                                                         - Ted
>


-- 
Salvo Tomaselli

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