Re: A policy on use of AI-generated content in Debian
On Thu, May 02, 2024 at 08:21:28PM -0400, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote:
> So I'm actually more concerned about LLM being mindlessly applied in
> our communication processes (NM, bts, debconf, irc, planet, wiki,
> website, debian.net stuff, etc) than one using some AI-assisted code
> in our infra, at least for now.
On that front, useful "related work" are the policies that scientific
journals and conferences (which are exposed *a lot* to this, given their
main activity is vetting textual documents) have put in place about
this.
The general policy usually contains two main points (paraphrased below):
(1) You are free to use AI tools to *improve* your content, but not to
create it from scratch for you.
This point is particular important for non-native English speakers,
who can benefit a lot more than natives from tool support for tasks
like proofreading/editing. I suspect the Debian community might be
particularly sensible to this argument. (And note that on this one
the barrier between ChatGPT-based proofreading and other grammar/
style checkers will become more and more blurry in the future.)
(2) You need to disclose the fact you have used AI tools, and how you
have used them.
Exactly as in your case, Tiago, people managing scientific journals and
conferences have absolutely no way of checking if these rules are
respected or not. (They have access to large-scale plagiarism detection
tools, which is a related but different concern.) They just ask people
to *state* they followed this policy upon submission, but that's it.
If your main concern is people using LLMs or the like in some of the
processes you mention, a checkbox requiring such a statement upon
submission might go a longer way than a project-wide statement (which
will sit in d-d-a unknown to n-m applicants a few years from now).
Cheers
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack@upsilon.cc . https://upsilon.cc/zack _. ^ ._
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