Hello, I am seconding Pierre-Elliott's option, which I quote in full below.
While not a fan of what has happened in the LLM world, I cannot agree a
valid way out that will project Debian as a responsible project for the
future is to stick the sand and sing “lalala this does not exist”. Going in
a prohibitionist route will turn us more into censors than anything; I
prefer we are open regarding the tools we use, and keep being responsible
and committed to verify the output we get when a tool gets prompted is of a
quality at least similar to what we would achieve at a first iteration of
human work.
As those that read Planet Debian might remember, I recently reviewed an
opinion article regarding the use of LLM fraud detectors against students,
regarding whatever we can get out of it self-deceiving and unfair. The
article is quite easy to read, and not too long. If you are interested in
reading it, find it at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1360080X.2026.2622146
Bassett, M. A., Bradshaw, W., Bornsztejn, H., Hogg, A., Murdoch, K.,
Pearce, B., & Webber, C. (2026). Heads we win, tails you lose: AI
detectors in education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and
Management, 1–16.
Pierre-Elliott Bécue dijo [Fri, Jul 24, 2026 at 12:40:59AM +0200]:
Based on the feedback I got:
BEGIN BALLOT OPTION
Accept AI contributions for Debian specific work
================================================
Debian as a project does not endorse or recommend the use of generative
AI assistants for software development, as it raises multiple concerns
about ethics, legality, copyright, etc.
Nevertheless, Debian acknowledges that these practices are already in
use and here to stay. Rather than banning their use, which seems
counter-productive and unenforceable, the project chooses to place
responsibility on contributors and therefore defines the following
guidelines.
*These apply exclusively to code and work done specifically for the
Debian project (Debian websites, applications, resources, packages,
etc.)*. They do not apply to any upstream work. In what follows, "work"
refers to the contributions done specifically for the Debian project.
- All code and work assisted by a generative AI agent or tool must
comply with the DFSG.
- The submitter is solely responsible for the submitted work and:
+ they sufficiently evaluated and properly understand the work they
intend to submit, and are able to explain and defend it;
+ they put any potential Signed-off-by tag and GPG signatures on the
contributions they send to the Debian infrastructure (package,
commit, mail, …) themselves;
+ any content uploaded that would end up in production on Debian
infrastructure (main git branch, package upload) has been submitted
by them explicitely.
- Work assisted by a generative AI agent or tool should be marked as
such in the adapted place (commit message, changelog, …). Some
lightweight generative tools, such as tab-completion in Copilot, may
be used without the contributor realising they rely on generative AI
models; we therefore trust submitters to assess when this rule
applies. When in doubt, add such marking;
- No cloud-based AI shall be used when the data transmitted could
either be sensitive to the project (personal data, information under
embargo, …) or not public (debian-private discussions, …).
END BALLOT OPTION
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