How does an "I didn't use AI" pledge provide any assurance/provenance that submitted code wasn't copied from an AGPLv3 reference?
It doesn’t, it provides an assurance (but not provenance) you didn’t use AI.
Assuring you didn’t include any AGPLv3 code in your contribution is exactly the same kind of assurance. It also doesn’t provide any provenance.
Conflating assurance with provenance is bogus because the former is about making a representation that, if false, exposes the person making it to liability. For most situations that’s sufficient that provenance isn’t needed.
If it's exactly the same as what you'd have written manually, and you are confident it works, then what's the point of disclosure?
An LLM is regurgitating things from outside that space, where you have no idea of the provenance of what it’s putting into your code.
It doesn’t just matter that the code you’re contributing to a project is correct, it matters quite a lot if it’s actually something you’re allowed to contribute.
- You can’t contribute code that your employer owns to a project if they don’t want you to. - You can’t contribute code under a license that the project doesn’t want you to use. - And you can’t contribute code written by someone else and claim it’s your intellectual property without some sort of contract in place to grant that.
If you use an LLM to generate code that you’re contributing, you have both of the latter two problems. And all of those apply *even if* the code you’re contributing is identical to what you’d have written by hand off the top of your head.
When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.
Why does this seem so difficult for some supposed tech professionals to understand? The entire industry is intellectual property, and this is basic “IP 101” stuff.