AI Contribution Policy For MONAI

[ericspod]

A policy stating requirements for AI generated or assisted contributions should be developed for repositories across the MONAI project. This is needed to ensure contributions from any party meet open source license requirements, allow attribution consistent with DCO requirements enforced by the project, and make clear the origin and nature of code or data being proposed for inclusion.

Policies regarding AI have been developed by other open source projects/foundations, most prominently is the Linux Foundation stating requirements for generative AI contributions and guidance for the use of coding assistants. Other organisations have developed similar policy statements, eg. Python, PyTorch, EFF.

MONAI should include a policy with its contribution guidance which ensures:

• AI assistance or generation is not prohibited but must have accompanied human review and oversight, such that the contributor can honestly take responsibility for the proposed content.
• Any contributed code or data must adhere to open source and open data licensing conditions irrespective of size or nature of proposed content.
• The contributor can honestly sign their commits to satisfy DCO requirements, that is they can certify the origin of their contributions.
• Attribution to AI tools may be mandated as well if these are used to generate anything beyond trivial content.
• Any documentation, description, discussion, or other informative material forming part of the proposed content must be written by the contributor.
• AI code review is a separate subject from generation, such that these tools can be used to help review and amend contributions so long as these only assist human reviewers who take responsibility for review results/comments.

These policy statements should be discussed to refine the content and consider other issues not touched upon here.

[ericspod]

For my part I feel that much AI tool use is much like using linters or code generators. From before YACC even, code generation has been a valuable tool without raising the issues discussed above. It's the breadth and possibilities of AI tools that differ from simple code generators thus requiring deeper thought, and the threat of hallucination or unintended IP theft not found in older tools. AI tools for generation or analysis are fine so long as they assist the human and not replace the human.