Re: Introduce Sashiko (agentic review of Linux kernel changes)

["Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>]

One other thing to consider is copyright.  This issue is one we can
safely ignore when we are asking LLM's to review code.  But if ask
LLM's to generate documentation, and then we cut and paste the
generated text into kernel documentation, the copyright status of the
generated text is not well defined.

In Europe, the European Comission has promulgated that LLM output,
having been generated by a machine, and not a human being, is not
copyrighted.  If a human being then makes changes, the combined work
could be subject to copyright, and if it is merged into code that is
subject to the GPL (for example), the combined work would also be
subject to the original license.   But that's only in Europe.

But consider researchers were able to extract 96% of Harry Potter and
the Sourcerer's Stone from Claude 3.7 Sonnet.  So with the right
prompt, if we get a paragraph that came from some published book about
Linux, and it was dropped into the Documentation/ directory, that
might be problematic, since even (or maybe especially) the European
Union might want to take a hard line.  (Do you hear the people sing,
singing the songs of angry Victor Hugo's?  :-)

If we use an LLM model analyze docuemntation to identify gaps, and we
take a bullet list of missing functions or semantics, and the human
being writes new text from scratch, instead of cutting and pasting
directly from LLM, that should be safe.  But of course, I'm not a
lawyer and I don't play one on TV.

Cheers,

						- Ted