As I understand, there are currently no real guidelines for this, even though AI is currently a big topic in FOSS.
In my opinion, AI can be quite dangerous for free software and that's why we really need to discuss how we can address this issue. Here are some of the reasons for that:
- Poor quality, insecure code: AI still produces hard to maintain code, that is often severely insecure. Even if you check every line of code carefully, there is a good chance you overlook something, because you won't fully understand the code, you haven't written yourself
- Licensing issues: AI often reproduces code from it's training material, which could be incompatible with this codes license
- Legal trouble: The legality of the copyright about AI is not yet really settled, so it could be a big legal risk to have AI-code in your codebase
- Ethics: AI systematically exploits the work of all open source contributors for the profit of big companies. We as part of the free software movement should reject this more openly
My idea for this policy was, that we should definetely demand for AI generated code to be marked as such (you have to disclose in your commits, if you have used AI for that). I think we should also ban entirely AI-generated PRs aswell, because they produce more work for the maintainers than they actually help with anything. Were I am not quite sure yet, is how we handle the case when someone used AI just as autocomplete, but wrote most of the code themselves? You should probably also have to disclose that, do you think we should ban something like that?
Looking forward to hear what you think about this!
Since before PieFed was officially released, the code was available so that an instance admin could modify it and run as they pleased. Nobody is talking about taking that functionality away. So modify to your heart's content.
Also, while it might not be obvious from all of the comments, the OP was also not talking about forbidding all PRs containing AI generated code either.
Just labeling them is all. So that the devs have a better sense of what they are getting into. 1k lines of code that was 100% vibe-coded, not tested in the slightest, and for a new feature that nobody has asked for? Yeah that's going to be at the bottom of the pile.
Previously, it would have been really difficult to get 1k lines of code unless someone has at least a rudimentary knowledge of programming concepts - if() statements, for() loops, understanding whether array indices begin at 1 or 0, and so on. However now with LLMs, that is no longer a barrier, so people are discussing how to adapt to the new landscape.
You can still do whatever you want - same as before - this post is just talking about clarifying the expectations so that the developers who want to contribute to this project can all work together more smoothly, with fewer miscommunications due to false assumptions.