If the owner or maintainer of a project does not want AI-generated code in their project, people should not submit AI-generated code to it. That people so often do does not mean the project should allow it: it means we have a culture that fails to understand consent.
Recently, Fedora adopted an “AI-assisted contributions policy“. The short version of it: AI coding assistance is allowed, if you disclose its use.
You MAY use AI assistance for contributing to Fedora, as long as you follow the principles described below.
Transparency: You MUST disclose the use of AI tools when the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes. You SHOULD disclose the other uses of AI tools, where it might be useful.
The Linux distribution Bazzite, for reasons unknown to me, decided to defend that policy on BlueSky with this reasoning (emphasis mine):
To add, without this change Fedora would be shipping AI-assisted code anyway. If Fedora had a no-AI policy people would just break it, meaning Fedora contributors wouldn’t know if specific code was assisted by AI or not.
So long as rules can easily be broken, they will be. This prevents that.
Xe, author of the anti-LLM-scraper tool Anubis (which itself was LLM-assisted) shared a post on Bluesky that takes the same stance, with a very similar argument (emphasis mine):
Something I’ve seen around the internet is that many projects want a blanket policy of no AI tools being allowed for contributors. As much as I agree with the sentiment of policies like this, I don’t think it’s entirely realistic because it’s trivial to lie about not using them when you actually do.
This argument is bullshit.
The crux of it is simple: People will lie about using generative AI. Rather than trying to enforce a no-AI rule, where people will then submit AI code as their own, make using it require a disclosure. Sounds great on paper: it’s industry self-regulation. Just ask people to follow the rules, and hope they follow along.
An obvious conflict of interest arises: “what if the people using AI still lie about using it?” If you’ve already established that people willing to use generative AI are willing to lie about it, then why would this stop them? If there’s nothing wrong with submitting AI-generated code, then why should they need to disclose it? Even if they get busted for not disclosing it, the penalty is nothing: it’s a trivial mistake, a simple “git commit –amend” away from being acceptable.
Allowing it with a disclaimer makes it easier to slip in non-disclaimed, AI generated code, too. Assume the logic works, and people are submitting their AI-assisted slop with proper “Assisted-by” annotations. That gives rise to the assumption that someone who doesn’t use that annotation it didn’t use generative AI: the whole reason to allow it was because otherwise people would lie about its use!
It is strange to me to consider bad actors only in the case where it favors your argument.
The original post continues:
Anyways, at a high level if you ask people to disclose what AI tools they are using and make it so that the default configuration of most AI tooling will just add that disclosure for you, people are much more likely to comply with that policy. I think that this is a better middle ground than having witch hunts trying to figure out who used what tool and letting it become a free ground for noisy, low‑quality contributions.
Where do the “noisy, low-quality contributions” come from, exactly? From people blindly using LLMs to “contribute”?
The language choice of “witch hunts” is also interesting, especially when your entire argument revolves around people habitually lying. Is it still a witch hunt when there’s actual witches? The author specifically points out their LLM coauthor wanted to use a different phrase, too:
For what it’s worth, I had to fight the local AI model over the use of the phrase “witch hunts”. It really wanted “targeted investigations” instead.
Hmm.
Finally:
I want to see a future where people are allowed to experiment with fancy new tools. However, given the risks involved with low‑effort contributions causing issues, I think it’s better for everyone to simply require an easy machine‑readable footer.
I feel like I have to point this out: You can already do this. You can already run an LLM and have it generate a whole project for you. Nobody is stopping you from doing that. You can also download a project, and make your own additions to it. Again, nobody stops you. Go nuts.
People can say, however, that those contributions aren’t welcome in their project. If someone copies a GameFAQs entry for TCRF, it’s removed for being plagiarism. Do people lie about sourcing? Absolutely. Does that mean we allow it? Absolutely not! It just makes those people liars, and when we find out they’re liars, we deal with them.
Ultimately
This argument treats rules and consent as optional. Something you can and should ignore if you think it’s too difficult to follow or obtain.
If the owner or maintainer of a project does not want AI-generated code in their project, people should not submit AI-generated code to it. That people so often do does not mean the project should allow it: it means we have a culture that fails to understand consent.
No means no.
This post was written over the course of a few hours, without the assistance of any generative AI or LLM tools. I can take pride knowing that this work, mistakes and all, is mine. It is my skill, my voice, my writing.
I want to note that my post does not consider things like “ethical data sourcing for training”, “external costs of training the models”, “costs of compute to run them”, etc… It is simply: if a maintainer says do not use a tool in their project, that means do not use the tool in their project.