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Contributor's Guide

Policy forbidding the use of AI-generated content in NetApp technical documentation

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At NetApp, we value the expertise of our employees, contractors, and partners in creating, publishing, and maintaining accurate, relevant, useful technical documentation for our customers. We believe that the use of AI-generated content can compromise these values and undermine the integrity and accuracy of our documentation. Therefore, NetApp's policy is to prohibit publication of AI-generated content that has not been verified and validated by a human. This applies to all technical documentation published on docs.netapp.com. Note that this policy is similar to and extends NetApp’s policy that forbids the use of languages models to write code for the products it sells.

We expect all NetAppDocs contributors to adhere to the following policy:

  • We do not allow publication of customer-facing documentation (how to use NetApp products) generated from AI without human review and validation. This includes written materials, graphics, multimedia, or other materials that are published on docs.netapp.com. All content published on docs.netapp.com must be verified and validated by human content creators.

  • Part of the role of content creator for docs.netapp.com involves adhering to the style and contributor guides. This includes staying informed about the latest developments in AI-generated content and their implications for NetApp technical documentation.

  • All employees, contractors, and partners are expected to comply with the policy. Repeated violations may result in suspended authoring privileges.

NetAppDocs contributors should keep the following in mind:

  • All AI-based content-generating technologies embedded in software you have installed on your work computer, including ones like Microsoft 365 Co-pilot, send your data to the company that hosts the assistive technology. Do not prompt such a technology with company confidential content, including but not limited to specifications for unreleased product features.

  • Do not use public AI technologies to generate or edit technical documentation for previously unreleased products, versions of products, or features within products.

  • Copyright for new technical documentation must remain within NetApp and not be shared with AIs outside NetApp prior to official product release dates and the corresponding publication of related technical documentation.

  • Do not send confidential documentation or newly-written content into AI (ChatGPT or any other tool). Any information fed into ChatGPT becomes a part of its training dataset, which in turn becomes property of OpenAI and can be used by them and their users. While much of this data is publicly accessible, we do not want to train the model on our own IP.