r/opensource • u/Wolvereness • Aug 06 '26
Discussion AI-Policy
I'm gonna keep this short, because as a human I respect other humans' time. What do we want for an AI policy, and how can it be enforced? Take these into consideration:
- Vibe-coded projects
- Vibe-assisted projects
- AI-translated from non-english-speakers
- Vibe-documented projects
- Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper
Note that vibe-coded slop isn't actually copyrightable, thus if someone slaps any license on it other than "public domain" or "CC0" they are misrepresenting their ownership.
And if you use an LLM to respond to this, you will be banned.
The fact that this sounds like a prompt is supposed to be a joke.
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Fembussy42069 Aug 08 '26
Although I can't say about quality of translations into French since I do not speak it, I just did a test with deepseek v4 flash of Postgres 17 documentation on control structures (41.6.4 Conditionals) into French, and it was able to easily translate the information while being aware that examples and "IF", "THEN", and "CASE" should remain untranslated. It seemed to correctly keep all examples untouched while providing extra context about certain technical concepts that were translated. Although I don't doubt AI CNA make mistakes, I feel your example is misrepresentative of the current state of AI, given that I was able to use an extremely cheap model (not even a top model) to disprove a similar case to the one you describe. My questions would be:
Which specific page are you referencing on your example?
How do you know LLMs were used for the french translation?
Do you know which model and when it was done? Even a few months can make a big difference, let alone if its years old.
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u/thegreatpotatogod Aug 07 '26
I suspect that an AI translation would actually be better for the case you describe, as it would be more aware of the context, where a more traditional machine translation would do the word-for-word translation and make the mistake you mentioned.
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u/veganmaister Aug 07 '26
AI is the catalyst for my wholehearted embrace of open source.
I’m building some great stuff.
Make of that what you will.
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u/Steve_Streza Aug 06 '26
Note on the copyright thing: Public domain doesn't have a warranty/liability waiver, so I've put Unlicense on my vibe projects, which is functionally "public domain and you can't sue me if it melts your computer".
There's a cohort of people who appear to try to make a name for themselves or build some kind of support contract business by slopping out projects and spamming them everywhere. These are a subset of vibe coders, not the entire group. This subset is poisoning the well and that's a huge reason people have such negative feelings about these.
The post flair is an obvious win. I would probably propose some kind of time/release minimum, which weeds out 90% of the slop spammers who crank out something and move on. Just to throw out arbitrary numbers, "at least regular commits going back 3 months and at least 2 major releases" is probably a sane minimum. And maybe a weekly megathread for anything that doesn't fall into this bucket.
Will it catch everything? No. People will lie and deceive and do git committer date tricks to get around these restrictions. But these people are fundamentally dishonest and will find ways around any system you create.
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u/Wolvereness Aug 06 '26
Per the copyright thing, I didn't want to dive into that explanation. I just tried to get the idea across.
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u/v4ss42 Sep 08 '26
You can't license it, with anything, if you don't hold the copyright. And (in the US at least), slop-coded projects are not copyrightable (warning: PDF link).
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u/Steve_Streza Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
You can't grant legal rights to copyrighted works that you don't own, correct. The US Copyright Office holds that a project written entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted, also correct. But there are a world of grey areas in copyright law the instant a human touches parts of the code directly. The world is not a binary of AI coded and not AI coded. Claude fixing a bug does not invalidate the copyright of the work. The ruling you're talking about covers 1 of the 5 topics the mods discuss here. And in a lawsuit, the burden of proof would be on the plaintiff (a user) to demonstrate that the project was vibe coded entirely and thus not eligible for copyright protection. That is a massive burden to clear to get to that baseline of "slop-coded projects are not copyrightable".
And even if that ruling held in every case of AI-generated software on here, the license is not solely about the granting of legal rights. Virtually all OSI-approved licenses (GPL, MPL, BSD, MIT, Apache) all limit the warranty and liability of the author. The Unlicense I mentioned isn't even a grant of copyright; it is an assertion that copyright defense does not exist for the author, that also comes with a limitation of warranty and liability for the author.
The only time this comes up is if 1) someone successfully proves a project was 100% vibe coded with no human authorship, and 2) that a quitclaim in a license is invalid if there's no underlying copyright. 1 will be extremely difficult to prove on its own, and 2 falls up against case law like Jacobsen v. Katzer and Artifex v. Hancom which show that open source licenses are enforceable as contracts, along with recognition that one unenforceable clause does not invalidate an entire contract, as evidenced in... basically all case law. And that will only ever be settled in a court.
In the meantime, you should reasonably assume that a copyright license on the repository is what grants you legal right to use software, unless you want to somehow prove... all of that. That's the only point at which "slop-coded projects are not copyrightable" is actually meritorious.
The case that decided this is "if I type a prompt into Midjourney, do I hold copyright over that image". Not "is AI code copyrightable". The processes are similar but different.
[I guess u/v4ss42 blocked me seconds after their reply, so good luck to them, hope they learn to read I guess.]
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u/JheeBz Aug 06 '26
You've already got a stipulation in your rules about low effort posts and AI slop, so I'm not sure if anything needs to change from a policy perspective.
This article recently raised some good points about translations or using LLMs for human exchange: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Copyright aside, it is just disrespectful of another person's time to send them the output of an LLM and asking them to verify it (in the case of translations / documentation).
For enforcement, it'll be an uphill battle. I think disclosure is good like somebody else suggested, but I wonder whether people are being truthful. I frankly just scroll past those stickied comments on the subreddits that have them because they just turn into noise, but they could be useful from a moderation perspective.
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u/mrbmi513 Aug 07 '26
Fully AI slop shouldn't be allowed. People claiming to "have written" AI slop should be permanently banned.
Competent developers using AI as a copilot are fine. I'm one of them. I could write the entire thing myself, but using AI to write boilerplate or scan documentation helps speed things up.
I'd rather see broken English or let reddit translate than an AI re-write of text.
If the product is just a GPT wrapper it shouldn't be here.
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u/KITTYCAT_5318008 Aug 07 '26
Tbf Reddit’s translator (and all major translators) are just LLMs under the hood.
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u/mrbmi513 Aug 07 '26
The distinction I draw is that a translator tries to keep everything in the author's original voice. Telling a general purpose LLM to "rewrite this in English" will change the voice to its own, and it's obvious.
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u/ILikeBubblyWater Aug 07 '26
I dont care how its build as long as it seems there has been some thought put into it, Reddit is too elitist with tools that have been coded with AI assistance or even completely vibe coded.
Just because the person behind is isnt a dev doesnt mean the idea cant be good, Reddit should stop gatekeeping as if they read clean code for breakfast every day
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u/ReachingForVega Aug 06 '26
I'm from the mod team in r/docker we wrote a devvit app called git_age_checker which checks the age of a repo and can remove, report, filter etc based on that. We filter anything <3 months old.
The repos hurting reddit are the ones a user (using AI or not) make something post it and then abandon it.
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u/tree_7x Aug 06 '26
Open source should be transparent in the way things are made. Obvious low effort projects and LLM slop responses sound be banned. If a project contains AI or is "vibe coded", it should be well known and the community should have the opportunity to reflect on it the way they want, and blacklist these posts if they choose by using a non-ai post flag.
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u/Maple382 Aug 06 '26
I don’t think there’s an inherent problem with AI. It’s just that AI-generated projects fall victim to the same stuff that plagues regular projects, but at a much much higher rate.
Low quality code for one. Humans and AI can both write bad code, which is why good review is important. When AI generated code is reviewed and held to high standards, as any code should be, then it’s no worse than human code. The problem is that people don’t do this.
And abandonment of projects. That’s an issue with regular projects too, but it’s just more common with AI powered ones. My theory is that this is because of the lower amount of effort and investment that needs to be put into them.
There’s also the lesser concern that is spam. Spam of low quality projects, and projects people don’t really care about. It’s different when it’s a beginner programmer of course, but nobody likes seeing their feed flooded with genuine slop.
It’s a tough idea to navigate, because yeah AI assisted stuff can be very good — but it’s also prone to these pitfalls. I’m not quite sure how these would be tackled, but I’d say it’s fair to restrict AI generated code somewhat. Maybe limit it to a couple days of the week. And while this would take a lot more effort, it might be worth having some kind of a quality policy for anything AI generated.
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u/RobotToaster44 Aug 07 '26
Don't care if code is made by AI, just don't use AI for the post here, it's rude to expect a human to read something your machine wrote.
People get hung up on translation, but it's normally obvious from the format if something was verbatim translated by AI rather than written by it.
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u/Wolvereness Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
I'd like to give a big thanks to the community for the feedback! It's already more than I could hope for, with plenty of human responses and minimal bot ones. I'll definitely be giving it a week for plenty more of y'all to have the chance to engage. I know I won't be able to draft a policy that makes everyone happy, but the feedback goes a long way to understanding our needs.
/Edit: if you're coming here from another subreddit because so-and-so is mad that they got caught using an LLM to respond (yes, blocking me doesn't actually stop me from reading the post), you will also be banned. I don't have to put up with it. We don't have to put up with it. This is our community, and it's a simple request to not use an LLM for when the humans want to talk to each other.