Related:
This is in a PR where Shougo, another long-time contributor, communicates entirely in walls of unparseable AI slop text: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/19413
Thank you for the detailed feedback! I’ve addressed all the issues:
Thank you for the feedback! I agree that following the Vim 8+ naming convention makes sense.
Thank you for the feedback on naming!
Thanks for the suggestion! After thinking about this more, I believe repeat_set() / repeat_get() is the right choice:
Thank you for the feedback. A brief clarification.
hi, i have strong feelings about the use of genai but i come at it from a very different direction (story writing). it’s possible for someone to throw together a 300 page story book in an afternoon - in the style of lovecraft if they want, or brandon sanderson, or dan brown (dan brown always sounds the same and so we might not even notice). now, the assumption that i have about said 300 pager is that it will be dogshit, but art is subjective and someone out there has been beside themselves pining for it.
but this has always been true. there have always been people churning out trash hoping to turn a buck. the fact that they can do it faster now doesn’t change that they’re still in the trash market.
so: i keep writing. i know that my projects will be plagiarized by tech companies. i tell myself that my work is “better” than ai slop.
for you, things are different. writing code is a goal-oriented creative endeavor, but the bar for literature is enjoyment, and the bar for code is functionality. with that in mind, i have some questions:
if someone used genai to generate code snippets and they were able to verify the output, what’s the problem? they used an ersatz gnome to save them some typing. if generated code is indistinguishable from human code, how does this policy work?
for code that’s been flagged as ai generated- and let’s assume it’s obvious, they left a bunch of GPT comments all over the place- is the code bad because it’s genai or is it bad because it doesn’t work?
i’m interested to hear your thoughts
That’s a very good question, and I appreciate it.
I put a lot of this in the reasoning section of the policy, but basically there are legal, quality, security, and community reasons. Even if the quality and security reasons are solved (as you’re proposing with the “indistinguishable from human code” aspect), there are still legal and community reasons.
Legal
AI generated material is not copyrightable, and therefore licensing restrictions on it cannot be enforced. It’s considered public domain, so putting that code into your code base makes your license much less enforceable.
AI generated material might be too similar to its copyrighted training data, making it actually copyrighted by the original author. We’ve seen OpenAI and Midjourney get sued for regurgitating their training data. It’s not farfetched to think a copyright owner could go after a project for distributing their copyrighted material after an AI regurgitated it.
Community
People have an implicit trust that the maintainers of a project understand the code. When AI generated code is included, that may not be the case, and that implicit trust is broken.
Admittedly, I’ve never seen AI generated code that I couldn’t understand, but it’s reasonable to think that as AI models get bigger and more capable of producing abstract code, their code could become too obscure or abstracted to be sufficiently understood by a project maintainer.