AI code generation tools have gained significant popularity among developers, who use them to assist in software development due to their capability to generate code. Existing studies mainly explored the quality, e.g., correctness and security, of AI-generated code, while in real-world software development, the prerequisite is to distinguish AI-generated code from human-written code, which emphasizes the need to explicitly declare AI-generated code by developers. To this end, this study intends to understand the ways developers use to self-declare AI-generated code and explore the reasons why developers choose to self-declare or not. We conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of two phases. In the first phase, we mined GitHub repositories and collected 613 instances of AI-generated code snippets. In the second phase, we conducted a follow-up industrial survey, which received 111 valid responses. Our research revealed the practices followed by developers to self-declare AI-generated code. Most practitioners (76.6%) always or sometimes self-declare AI-generated code. In contrast, other practitioners (23.4%) noted that they never self-declare AI-generated code. The reasons for self-declaring AI-generated code include the need to track and monitor the code for future review and debugging, and ethical considerations. The reasons for not self-declaring AI-generated code include extensive modifications to AI-generated code and the developers' perception that self-declaration is an unnecessary activity. We finally provided guidelines for practitioners to self-declare AI-generated code, addressing ethical and code quality concerns.

本研究解决了开发者在软件开发中自我声明AI生成代码的需求与实践空白。通过对GitHub代码库的分析和行业调查，本研究发现大多数开发者（76.6%）在一定程度上会自我声明AI生成代码，其主要原因包括未来审查和调试的需要以及伦理考虑。研究为开发者提供了自我声明AI生成代码的指导，旨在提升代码质量和伦理意识。

关于开发者自我声明AI生成代码的实践分析