On Sat, 2026-02-14 at 10:10 +0000, Matthew Brett via NumPy-Discussion wrote: > Hi Ralf, > > I think you're playing the ball and not the man, and apart from that > being unpleasant for me, it's bad for the discussion. If we are not > careful, people will be discouraged from posting for fear of personal > attack. > > That said - I do apologise for using "obviously" - thanks for > pointing > that out - it was rude of me, and I will try to be more careful. > > On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 9:05 AM Ralf Gommers via NumPy-Discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > On Fri, Feb 13, 2026 at 12:02 PM Matthew Brett via NumPy-Discussion > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > Ralf pointed out one benefit - that we are not seen to disapprove > > > of > > > the chosen workflows of our fellow developers. I think this is > > > a > > > weak argument. > > > > > > Please, read and reason more carefully. That was right below a > > principle "honor copyright". One does not invalidate or contradict > > the other. > > > > > So, accepting large AI-generated PRs would be a significant > > > threat to > > > copyright > > > > > > You have a good point in your arguments about copyright somewhere, > > but you're making it very poorly, verbosely, and with too much > > confidence when using words like "obviously". It's easy to come up > > again with examples for why a "large AI-generated PR" isn't > > copyrightable. E.g., filling holes in test coverage, say for nan's, > > empty arrays, or noncontiguous arrays. Such an effort involves > > tedious boilerplate tests with no copyrightable content, and we'd > > happily outsource that to a tool, and may be thousands of lines of > > code. > > > > For large PRs with intellectually stimulating and copyrightable > > code, there is also a gray zone where the human does most of the > > thinking, outlines the solution while stubbing out a lot of > > details, and then lets a tool fill in the details. That might all > > be fine too - it depends. > > I don't know why you would think that I hadn't understood that there > were nuanced arguments to be made for the acceptability of any > particular piece of AI-generated code. Did you not read my reply to > Ilhan, for example? > > > The thing to be done here is to find understandable and pragmatic > > wording for a policy that discourages and lets us reject the > > undesirable usage of AI tools, while not hindering valid usage. > > Being overly broad and moralizing with inactionable wording isn't > > helpful. > > I think you're confusing the statement of ethical principles, with > being overly broad and inactionable. I don't know what "moralizing" > means, but I'm assuming that it can't reasonably be applied to the > statement "We have an ethical responsibility to uphold copyright". > If > we accept that statement, then we can have specific discussions about > what actions we need to take, and that's what I was doing - you must > have seen the specific proposal that I made. >
Yes, I think we have seen it (and while I might want to tone it down a bit, I think it is reasonable). But I'll admit that I also read it with a such a focus on the principle that it felt hard to make the transition to discussing the nuance. And part of that is probably that we agree that there is a potential legal/moral minefield here and the disagreement we have isn't that we shouldn't discuss a map, it's that we don't think a scary sign is useful. The other thing is that I think that I/we read it as a focus on these fundamental problems and that makes me feel it is a bit about us making a basically political/moral statement at large. I don't want to do that. In part because to me the moral/legal implication is much fuzzier than it seems at first (as Chuck mentioned the scope and duration of copyright changed a lot in the past! Presumably both legally and morally.). But also, I am not even sure that issues around AI and copyright are politically/morally what we as open source should emphasize. And even if they are, I would not be sure what direction I think we should throw our weight. - Sebastian > Cheers, > > Matthew > _______________________________________________ > 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] _______________________________________________ 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]
