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.

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally.

#1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models.

#2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects. The only room for debate on that is an apocalypse level scenario where humans fail to continue producing semiconductors or electricity.

#3 If a project successfully excludes AI contributions (not clear how other than controlling contributions to a tight group of anti-AI fanatics), it's just going to be cloned, and the clones will leave it in the dust. If the license permits forking then it could be forked too, but cloning and purging any potential legal issues might be preferred.

There still is a path for open source projects. It will be different. There's going to be much, much more software in the future and it's not going to be all junk (although 99% might.)

> #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects

Still waiting to see evidence of AI-driven projects eating the lunch of "traditional" projects.

It's happening slowly all around. It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated. But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy.

It's only going to get more pervasive from now on.

Can you show these 3 things to us?

Only the simplest one is open (and before you discount it as too trivial, somehow none of the other ones did what I wanted) https://github.com/viraptor/pomodoro

The others are just too specific for me to be useful for anyone else: an android app for automatic processing of some text messages and a work scheduling/prioritising thing. The time to make them generic enough to share would be much longer than creating my specific version in the first place.

> and before you discount it as too trivial, somehow none of the other ones did what I wanted

No offense, it's really great that you are able to make apps that do exactly what you want, but your examples are not very good to show that "software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects" (as someone else suggested above). Complex real world software is different from pomodoro timers and TODO lists.