AI is creeping into the Linux kernel - and official policy is needed ASAP

They found 1 (one!) commit in git, and report that's it's all over the kernel. Nice journalism.

That's ZDNET!
- Checked who the author was, should have guessed... SJVN. He certainly has a flair for taking something relatively small, that a solution already exists for and suggesting something bureaucratic, unnecessary, and completely outside his technical competence. This is one of those things that the kernel devs can, and will solve when it's a real problem. Random journalists and armchair experts can wait till they're called upon.
"it's one horse and they report that it's all over troy. nice journalism" - people living in troy
I mean, read into what they wrote about:
I'm pleased to announce the release of AUTOSEL, a complete rewrite of the stable kernel patch selection tool that Julia Lawall and I presented back in 2018[1]. Unlike the previous version that relied on word statistics and older neural network techniques, AUTOSEL leverages modern large language models and embedding technology to provide significantly more accurate recommendations.
...
Would be great to hear more. My very subjective feeling is that the last batch of AUTOSEL is much worse than the previous. Easily 50% of false positives.
Seems the newly rewritten kernel review tools wasn't what waa expected as an upgrade.
https://lists.linaro.org/archives/list/linux-stable-mirror@lists.linaro.org/thread/EJWMRUH2JTI34CPWVZZG62XJ7HMIH5WT/
Have you read the article? It's also about the tools and general discussion about LLMs in kernel development.

I guess the policy is that the code is reviewed. What does it matter if it was AI generated or not? If someone submits bullshit AI generated code he will be ignored in the future.

I would be deeply uncomfortable to work in an environment where one couldn't ask the author of a change for insights or rationale, because the author let some machine write it and therefore lacks any deeper understanding.
- For me it's grounds to deny a merge request. Can't explain your code? Then it's evidently not clear enough. Come back when it is.
Volume and Moderation.
Generating slop is significantly quicker.
You get an increase in volume of people pushing slop, which then has to be reviewed. In addition to the increase in submissions you also get the increase in fidelity/general complexity of the submissions.
Reviewing a PR generated by LLM's used by amateurs is more involved than an equivalent PR written directly by said amateur.
Straight up coding mistakes aren't most of the issue, it's the complex architectural and logical bugs that are going to be the problems.
Stuff that's functional but logically/architecturally unsound is much harder to spot and it's significantly easier to generate these kinds of issues with an LLM than to write them out by hand.
If someone submits bullshit AI generated code he will be ignored in the future.
Like this for example, a seemingly reasonable functional argument that is relatively logically unsound, in that is focuses on a narrow "happy path" and ignores where the actual issues are.
1 . To get to the stage where you can block this person you need to review the code first and identify if there is an issue.
Doing this for LLM generated code takes longer, on average.
It's also now possible for people less skilled to generate a higher volume of code that looks more reasonable, so that increases the total amount of reviews needed.
So the existing process of reviewing people and code is now a multiple more difficult and resource consuming.
Which is generally what people want addressed.
Can LLM's help?, possibly.
Are there issues that are going to become a large resource problem if we don't actually address them, yes.
- Ok, so you're suggesting that people are submitting kernel patches that somehow modify the architecture of the kernel/it's components, that the new architecture is very complex and hard to analyze, that the those architectural changes are part of roadmap and are not rejected right away and that those big, complex architectural level patches are submitted with high frequency. Somehow I doubt all of it.
  I think the slop patches are small fixes suggested by some AI code analysis tools, that architectural and complex changes are part of well defined roadmap and don't come out of nowhere and that code that doesn't follow conventions is easily spotted and rejected. The linked article talks only about marking the code as AI generated (IMHO useless but harmless) and increasing volume of AI slop patches. The idea that maintainers spend time analyzing complex LLM generated code submitted by random amateurs looking for possible architectural bugs sounds like a fantasy to me.
The issue is that it's easy for AI generated code to be subtly wrong in ways that are not immediately obvious to a human. The Linux kernel is written in C, a language that lets you do nearly anything, and is also inherently a privileged piece of software, making Linux bugs more serious to begin with.
The other problem is, of course, you can block someone submitting AI slop but there's a lot of people in the world. If there's a barrage of AI slop patches from lots of different people it's going to be a real problem for the maintainers.
- The issue is that it’s easy for AI generated code to be subtly wrong in ways that are not immediately obvious to a human.
  Same with human generated code. AI bug are not magically more creative than human bugs. If the code is not readable/doesn't follow conventions you reject it regardless of what generated it.
  The other problem is, of course, you can block someone submitting AI slop but there’s a lot of people in the world. If there’s a barrage of AI slop patches from lots of different people it’s going to be a real problem for the maintainers.
  You don't need official policy to reject a barrage of AI slop patches. If you receive to many patches to process you change the submission process. It doesn't matter if the patches are AI slop or not.
  Spamming maintainers is obviously bad but saying that anything AI generated in the kernel is a problem in itself is bullshit.
- It's about the people. If the AI generated code is subtly wrong, then it's on the community to test it and spot it. That's why it's important to have protocols and testing. The funny thing is you can also use AI to highlight bad code.
- Slippery slope bullshit. Completely ignoring that humans do all this dumb shit.
I think this needs to be the policy for all generated content. You can't stand behind the AI blaming it for its errors. It's like a CEO of a multinational bank blaming the inturn for a market crash.

I wonder if a "deposit" system for huge projects that get a lot of patch submissions might be worthwhile to deter vibe coders from submitting slop patches. You pay a trivial amount of money (adjusted for region/local currency strength) to submit a first patch and get it back if it's accepted. People who have already had patches accepted in the past are exempted.

AI is creeping on Kernel Sanders???