GCC Steering Committee Announces Strict AI Policy for Contributions
GCC steering committee announces AI policy
The GCC steering committee has adopted a new policy rejecting legally significant contributions derived from Large Language Models. While developers may use AI for research and bug reporting, any code or text exceeding roughly fifteen lines generated by an LLM will be declined. This decision aims to maintain project integrity, though it has sparked debate regarding enforceability and the future of AI in software development.
The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
- a1o
To people not interacting with open source projects that are stablished and popular, there are a lot of PRs and contributions where someone set an agent with a prompt like “contribute using my user to popular projects to improve my profile” or something similar and the entire PR and answers to maintainers questions and literally everything is entirely machine generated, without any human, and at the same time it is done in the cheapest way so steering the PRs in review isn’t even like “free tokens” because the model used is not good, so the output is always bad. The policies help point the agent to what is not allowed and shutdown the contribution, and so far the agents seems to respect it. Shutting down an agent without a policy to point to them make them very reactive. Note, there is no human involved in the other side! The person that set up the agent is not even aware of the specific PRs that are going.
- wxw
The policy source is worth reading: https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a...
> We welcome all contributors to the community even if they have not yet followed our policies; we should guide such contributors on how to do so.
Kudos to the GNU project for their attitude.
- rswail
Given that the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright to be enforceable, the fact that AI contributions are not copyrightable is something that is going to bite someone big very soon.
The US copyright office has released a public report about the fact that copyright requires a human author.
They compare the different cases of the equivalent of "prompt engineering", of a client that provides an architect guidance on what they want, but the architect holds the copyright in the actual drawings and structure, even if they use CAD tools.
Totally AI generated code as a result of a prompt is not going to be able to be defended under copyright IPRs.
So GCC are literally ensuring that there is a human in the loop to ensure that the GPL will stay enforceable.
- unprovable
The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.
- incognito124
> The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
This is such a fire quote
- marginalia_nu
Makes sense. The G in GCC is for GNU right, GNU as in Stallman-style Free Software. The GPL operates based on copyright licenses. If LLM output can not be copyrightable (as the courts seem to assert), then it can not be a significant part of Free Software.
- stabbles
Whether you agree with the policy or not, the way it's written is good. It just states the rules neutrally. See https://gcc.gnu.org/ai-policy.html.
In various projects I see AI policies that state not only the rules, but also their (moral) justification. I think that's worse, because I can agree to the rules, but that does not mean I subscribe to your point of view.
- wbolt
I guess AI companies are actually super happy with major open source projects having such policies. It guarantees that their source code repositories will remain amazing assets for the training dataset construction. Open source projects don't buy massive licenses anyway - the paying customer is in the enterprise not in open source. So it's fine for open source to go without AI and by doing this contributing to AI models becoming better and better.
So all in all, a good news to everyone :) Both the "pro-AI" and "anti-AI" crowds.
- rswail
There are two different but related copyright problems with LLM generated code:
1. Making a derivative work of already existing copyrighted code that breaks that code's license (eg injecting GPL code in output).
2. Fully LLM generated code is not able to be subject to copyright, because there is not a human author, which means that it is not able to be subject to a license.
#1 is a problem that the AI vendors are indemnifying customers for.
#2 is not something that AI vendors can change, as it is part of the enforceability of IPRs under law.
Companies are going to have to rely on trade secrets for protection of their closed source code, FOSS/GPL projects don't have that option.
- broodbucket
This is a pretty good middle ground, I think. You can't prevent LLM usage and there's significant downsides to doing so universally, so restricting contributions to things that a human needs to demonstrably understand circumvents a lot of problems.