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Comment by OuterVale | Hacker News Reader

Interesting stance to take. I do wonder how they'll verify it, though. There is no quantifiable way to identify if code is AI written, other than the general 'vibe'.

Will be interesting to see.

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I'm not sure I would call it an "interesting stance", as it's barely a stance and not at all interesting IMO . It's what they think is legally required to accept code given their license.

If there's a chance the providence of the code is tainted, the only thing that makes sense that doesn't cause the possibility of immense problems later is to reject it.

Yep, the world isn't always black and white. If I were to use Copilot to autocomplete the code I would've written myself (which is VERY often the case) I don't think it'd fall under this policy unless made overly obvious in some kind of rebellion act

I think the policy means what it says.

The old ‘You made this?…I made this’ meme comes to mind https://a.pinatafarm.com/440x959/e59eef9670/you-made-thisi-m...

Their issue is "unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD's licensing goals". Non-AI code with incompatible copyright/licensing is already banned even though there's no way to verify its provenance, so there's no change there.

Honesty boxes work with honest players. If they have to reject good code until they can trust the submitter, I'd be fine. Trust is human, and takes years, decades even, to be made.

Supply chain attack is knocking on the door. Maybe less people should work on OS kernels not more?

This is part of the contract all new committers are required to sign. Becoming a NetBSD committer requires membership of the NetBSD Foundation and there's an understanding that trust is expected.

Naturally, they'll use AI to detect it.

If this is not a joke, it might actually be a viable idea. It works pretty well for English text, for example:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15047

And, although I suspect the original comment was made sarcastically, not at all at odds with the reasoning why they would reject submissions with AI generated code.

I think ultimately text is too structured by itself to be able to understand whether it's AI-generated or not. You can easily tell LLMs to write in a different style or even give examples, and they'll happily oblige. Those tools are mostly useful for filtering out the laziest users who haven't tried playing around with the models enough.

I am interested to see what Google has developed with SynthID to be able to watermark text.

if it's good and it works well, then the human using the LLM did a good job, and need not credit their LLM of choice as one would not credit their rubber duck.

This thought process begs the question, why not just review code and deny what's bad, rather than blanket ban any code with LLM involvement? That way you retain the productivity benefits of LLMs, and can still deny flawed code.

Their issue is copyright, not code correctness/quality.

You have a rubber duck that writes code?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

That was the first thing I thought. I can take AI generated code and make it look like my own..that's easy

you could even train an llm on examples of ai generated code you've edited to look like your own and use that to rewrite ai written code

You can't verify it. And if you can, you can train on that. And if it's good? Good code is good code.

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