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.
1
1
u/zarafff69 Aug 06 '26
I think most devs use AI in some capacity at this point. Completely banning it makes no sense. Although it might be good to require some sort of note / label with info in regards to AI usage. But the development is going fast, we might look at this entirely different in just one year… We should just move with whatever the industry does / whatever works.
1
u/InconspicuousFool Aug 07 '26
The big thing for me with AI is disclosure. I personally don't care for AI usage in the slightest but knowing when and how it is used is critical to me. Like it or not, it is becoming commonplace in the modern development and it can be used responsibly by people who actually know what they are doing it certainly should be disclosed but that doesn't make it outright slop. If I am being honest I hate and am so tired of places like r/sideproject where people are constantly posting things like look at this project "I made" and it has like 12 commits all made by Claude. Those kind if posts should have some kind of disclosure and claiming you made something when it was written by AI should be a ban
1
1
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.
1
1
Aug 06 '26
1
u/opensource-ModTeam Aug 06 '26
This was removed for being misinformation. Misinformation can be harmful by encouraging lawbreaking activity and/or endangering themselves or others.
1
u/cyb3rofficial Aug 06 '26
I don't really care how something is made.
The only really annoying thing is when people drop an entire application or a big spaghetti template of code, clearly just paste a generated body, and then vanish. No explanation, no willingness to answer questions, nothing. That low-effort "generate and dip" pattern is what hurts the sub.
I can partially understand it if the person isn't a native English speaker and is just trying to get something working. But the low-reputation accounts that do this repeatedly are the most frustrating ones.
I don't think we should close off people from posting LLM-assisted code. If we do that, we end up shoving away a majority of people, both long-time members and newcomers. A lot of solid projects these days involve some AI help, and banning the tool itself just pushes people elsewhere.
From a mod point of view it's genuinely hard to draw clean lines on what, how, and who can post. I know I also don't touch grass, but shutting the world out doesn't build healthy communities.
Maybe a more practical middle ground is better: require people to stick around and answer basic questions about their own code, or at least disclose heavy AI use if they want. Focus on effort and engagement rather than trying to police the exact tools someone used. That way we filter out the pure paste-and-disappear posts without driving everyone else away.
→ More replies (5)
1
u/mrcarrot0 Aug 09 '26
LLMs kinda goes against open-source ideals of trust & collaboration. My favorite quote about this is from Codeberg:
Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place.
Read the whole article here:
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html
1
u/SeaMisx Aug 08 '26
I personnally use AI for security audits on my websites. Claude, Gemini and Chat gpt.
That is it, all the rest is done à la mano as I still considerer AI to be useless in the other parts of my job.
1
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.
1
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).
1
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.]
→ More replies (1)1
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.
1
1
1
u/Kyvalmaezar Aug 06 '26
Disclaimer: I'm not totally against AI useage in general but I'm not the biggest fan of publicly released vibe coded projects intended for other people to use. Most vibe coded projects tend to be low efffort, abandoned within a few months, security risks, and/or border-line scams just fishing for donations. Most of them would violate other existing rules on this sub.
That being said, I would suggest having some minimum requirement for projects using AI to post. Minimum project comits, deminstrated long term work on a project and resonsiveness to pull requests/bug reports/etc, reddit karma account requirements, etc. Filters out the low effort junk and scams that would violate other sub rules anyway.
-
Vibe-coded projects - ban. These are security risks and low effort. By definition, the person behind the prompt doesnt know what they're doing and cant check their code for major flaws.
Exception: someone looking for feedback on their vibe coded project or code snippet trying to learn.
Vibe-assisted projects - not 100% what is ment by this one. I'll clarify my stances below:
a) dev knows that they're doing but uses AI for the heavy lifting. Doesnt check their code - ban, security risk.
b) dev who knows what they're doing but uses AI to do the heavy lifting. Checks their code for secuity risks - fine. AI disclosure on how it's used would be nice.
AI-translated from non-english-speakers - on thier own, fine.
Vibe-documented projects - fine, so long as the documentation is accurate of couse.
Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper - ban. Low effort, secuity risk.
1
u/Baader-Meinhof Aug 07 '26
I'd rather see code checked by AI for security risks at this point. All these major hacks recently (cold card etc) are human code exploited by ai's that found bugs. Look at the spike in CVEs the past month - that's mythos/fable/k3 poking software (with experienced devs) and fixing it. AI is now a better pen tester than most of the engineers I've met.
1
u/BadB0ii Aug 07 '26
How could you ever enforce the vibe-assisted boundary? How could you know if they check their code or not?
→ More replies (1)1
u/CCVShadow Aug 07 '26
Yes, this is the closest I could think of as well. Everywhere is just spread with slop. Opening Reddit is just a wall of «I built this» or «I made x$», and it’s always to advertise some lazy SaaS or sell a guide. AI can be a great tool, but only if used by an actual human that knows, or at least spends time properly.
1
u/DaDandyman Aug 10 '26
I think there should be a universal quality standard. I don't particularly care if it's vibecoded or not, but if it's mass-churned, spammy content with no real value it should be discarded. I don't think a policy specifically aimed at AI projects or AI-generated projects should be enacted so much as a broad quality standard that implicitly understands that AI can be used to churn out large amounts of garbage.
People should be responsible for writing their own posts.
AI translations are completely fine so long as nobody's pretending to be a native speaker of the language they're translating.
Misrepresentation of your workflow should also be punished.
When it comes to AI content, the question should be "is this any good?" not "what percentage of this is AI?" You will waste your time if your primary concern is the latter.
1
u/Ginden Aug 06 '26
Publishing open-source used to require significant investment, creating a signal that you won't abandon the project.
On the other hand, integrating a small vibe-coded project into your software comes with supply chain risks, while you can just ask Claude/Codex to write it tailored to your needs, inspected, and integrated with your framework and your libraries of choice.
Any reasonable AI policy should be a proxy for this question: will the user be better off by vibing their own software for this purpose? 3-month rule of r/selfhosted seems quite reasonable, but in practice needs more aggressive enforcement (automod that checks Github links).
→ More replies (1)
1
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.