Re: Ballot option: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

Lucas Nussbaum <[email protected]> Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:01:42 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi Julian,

On 24/07/26 at 10:28 +0200, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> Notes and observations:
> 
> A. Advertising
> 
> For 4,5,6 I'd like us to avoid advertising individual companies or
> products in persistent history such as Git repositories, so I generally
> believe in "Assisted-By: LLM" as being preferable or record the history
> only in the merge request.
>
> I was arguing last week we should never disclose AI involvement
> but I think this went to far in the other direction.

The current version[1] of the disclosure clause is:
> Disclosure: When a significant portion of a contribution is generated
> or substantially assisted by a tool, contributors should disclose the use
> of the tool, making it clearly visible to the intended audience. This
> covers all forms of contribution, including code, mailing list posts, and
> bug discussions. The form of the disclosure is left to the contributor; one
> convenient option for commits is a Git trailer such as Generated-By: or
> Assisted-By:.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/ai-gr/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=heads

I think that this addresses your comment by leaving the disclosure
details to the contributor.

However I must say that I liked the idea of detailed disclosure, because
this provided a way to learn about others' practices.  I hope that we
will be able to organize some knowledge sharing about how to best use
LLMs. For example, what you describe about AI review bots below is super
interesting and I hope we can learn from that and generalize to other
interested projects.

> B. Additional requirements
> 
> I'm unsure if this GR provides me the means to impose additional
> requirements on APT contributors to use exclusively open weight
> models.

At this point I think that we should work on making high quality open
weight models available to every Debian contributor [who wants to use
them]. I've been working on that, had some success recently and hope to
be able to announce something soon.

It sounds a bit early to me to add such requirements when people might
not have an easy access to specific models.

Lucas
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