Hi All, I think the discussion of ethics is important, but somewhat abstract and difficult to act on.
Personally, I think the gravest danger is maintainer burn-out. The matplotlib "shame posting" referred to by Matthew earlier is a quite worrisome -- for those who haven't seen it, see https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 I'd estimate that those particular AI-generated PRs have led to a direct loss of at least a day of maintainer time (spread over multiple maintainers), plus, if they are at all like me, a further indirect loss of hours to days of being upset and irritated. Over at astropy, we currently see a smaller effect of AI bots: we are being spammed by two "developers" whose github pages state "currently working on upskilling myself in the field of AI" (both identical phrasing). Even just asking to be assigned in lots of issues is annoying, as it leads to e-mails in my inbox for any issue I happened to comment on. Also, I've been misled into reviewing/commenting on one PR, spending more time than it would have been to fix things myself, only to find out that it was generated by a bot, not a person who might become a valuable contributor. It left me feeling violated, and I hate feeling forced to a mode where I only review PRs from people/handles I know, and avoid getting notified except when tagged (though a few days ago, I got tens of e-mails from an account that seems to be replaying astropy PRs, yielding pings for any with @mhvk in them). Anyway, to me the most pressing question is to devise some sort of policy that stops people or their bots with no true interest in making real contributions. Sadly, I do not have a good suggestion. But perhaps a start is to have some kind of tick box for any new contributor that asks to state that one is a human and asks to introduce oneself, how one found the problem, and to describe how the PR was created and, e.g., confirm that it complies with the AI policy (including copyright, etc.). Or, more strongly, require explicit permission to create PRs (following a similar questionnaire). A non-standard API might help... Of course, neither of these suggestions will not guard against blatant liers, but perhaps they at least reduce the problem. All the best, Marten _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3//lists/numpy-discussion.python.org Member address: [email protected]
