Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain.

In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the rest of the code would raise the question of whether subsequent human edits were non-fair-use derivative works.

In the latter case the license restrictions no longer apply to portions of the codebase raising similar issues from derived code; a project that is only 98% OSS/FS licensed suddenly has much less leverage in takedowns to companies abusing the license terms; having to prove that infringers are definitely using the human-generated and licensed code.

Proprietary software is only mildly harmed in either case; it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries and try to make the case that AI-generated code infringed without being able to see the codebase itself. And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already.

If a software is truly wide open source in the sense of “do whatever the fuck you want with this code, we don’t care”, then it has nothing to fear from AI.

Open source is about sharing the source code. You generally need to force companies to share their source code derived from your project, or else companies will simply take it, modify it, and never release their changes,and charge for it too.