[PATCH] Documentation: document expectations around AI use

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

It's been suggested to me a couple of times recently that having some
statement about AI use in contributions would be helpful, for a couple
of different reasons:

 • It resolves uncertainty contributors may feel about whether their
   AI-assisted contributions will be welcome, since there is a wide
   range of acceptance among open source software projects currently.

 • It teaches people submitting assisted contributions to avoid
   pitfalls that might reduce the success of their contributions
   without otherwise having been obvious to them.

 • It protects against precious reviewer time being spent trying to
   sift through verbose and confusing LLM-generated descriptions,
   which tends to be much less efficient for the reviewer.

I've tried to keep it as simple and minimally invasive as possible,
focusing on remedying specific problems that are likely to come up.
Each expectation has a brief explanation, because I expect people will
be happier following the guidance if they understand the reason for
it, but I've avoided going into too much detail to keep it easy to
read, understand and remember the whole thing.  There's some slight
deliberate ambiguity, because the important thing here is that people
follow the spirit of the expectations.  They don't need to get in the
way in situations where it would obviously make sense to do something
different; for example I can imagine certain situations where it
would be useful to share some LLM-generated prose.

Signed-off-by: Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
---
We had a conversation about this on Matrix a little while ago, and I
hope this captures the consensus we had at the time.

I'm CCing everybody who's posted to the list recently (I think — sorry 
if I missed someone), because it's of course important to make sure
there's broad awareness of and agreement on the expectations.

I expect to apply this on top of my nav_order renumbering patch from
earlier, so this would show up in the documentation index after 
"Communication channels" and before "Sending Your Patch", since it's 
important context for people to have before sending their first patch.

 Documentation/doc/contributing/ai.adoc | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/doc/contributing/ai.adoc

diff --git a/Documentation/doc/contributing/ai.adoc b/Documentation/doc/contributing/ai.adoc
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..7535578e
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+++ b/Documentation/doc/contributing/ai.adoc
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+= Use of AI in Spectrum contributions
+:page-nav_order: 150
+
+// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>
+// SPDX-License-Identifier: GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-or-later OR CC-BY-SA-4.0
+
+Non-trivial Large Language Model (LLM) output in Spectrum contributions should
+be clearly marked as such.
+This is important context for reviewers, because humans and LLMs are prone to
+different kinds of mistakes.
+
+LLM-generated prose is discouraged.
+It tends to be overly verbose, and can be confusing because misunderstandings or
+false assumptions tend to be more difficult to spot in prose from LLMs than from
+humans.
+
+Contributors should ensure they understand and are able to answer questions about
+contributions they submit, in their own words.
+It's generally unhelpful to send LLM output in response to questions, because it
+can be expected that reviewers can ask LLMs questions themselves if LLM-generated
+answers would be useful to them.
+If a reviewer asks a contributor a question, it's because they want that
+contributor's answer, not an LLM's.

base-commit: 9dc81e02d6382ef7fc89b9bb246a71ff0fcc68ff
-- 
2.55.0