Ansible Community AI Policy Proposal

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Hello, Community!

During the Ansible Contributor Summit at CfgMgmtCamp and in a forum post, we discussed a lack of AI policy in Ansible and concluded that it should be developed, discussed, and accepted Ansible-wide ASAP.
Without an AI policy in place, contributors and maintainers don’t know how to act regarding AI, for example:

  • Is it OK to accept AI-assisted contributions?
  • Should AI usage be disclosed? If yes, how? Are there exceptions?
  • Is it OK to merge a pull request created solely by an AI bot or can we legitimately reject such pull requests because they don’t involve a human in the loop?

Our team (Ansible community & partner engineering) created a draft.
We used the Fedora AI policy, Linux Foundation AI policy, Ansible AI policy forum thread and How AI can support Ansible development forum thread for inspiration.

The key insights of the proposed policy:

  • We tried to keep it as minimalist as possible: it sets a flexible and general basis, defining a minimal set of requirements.
  • Individual projects can have their own (even stricter) AI policies that do not contradict this AI policy (similar to what we have with our CoC in the Ansible community package collection inclusion requirements).
  • It’ll apply to:
    • Ansible GitHub organizations such as ansible, ansible-community, ansible-collections.
    • Official platforms such as this forum, Matrix channels, etc.
    • Third-party projects that are part of official Ansible-related distributions such as Ansible collection included in the Ansible community package.

Important practical implications:

  • The policy gives maintainers an option to reject contributions opened by AI bots as violating the policy without any other justifications.
  • It allows maintainers to use AI bots for maintenance purposes including creating PRs, but with mandatory human gating.
  • It requires AI-assistance disclosure from contributors in a specific format.
  • It requires AI-assisted contributions to comply with the CoC and the specific project’s license.

Proposed roadmap for this initiative:

  • Discuss and polish the AI policy text in the pull request
  • Get the policy approval from Red Hat legal
  • Start a poll here to accept the policy (merge the PR) or to work on it more

We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this initiative here in comments and in the PR.

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