Related:
This is in a PR where Shougo, another long-time contributor, communicates entirely in walls of unparseable AI slop text: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/19413
Thank you for the detailed feedback! I’ve addressed all the issues:
Thank you for the feedback! I agree that following the Vim 8+ naming convention makes sense.
Thank you for the feedback on naming!
Thanks for the suggestion! After thinking about this more, I believe repeat_set() / repeat_get() is the right choice:
Thank you for the feedback. A brief clarification.
I spent literally all day yesterday working on this:
https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/
I’ve started to add it to my projects. Eventually, it will be on all of my projects. I made it so that any project could adopt it, or modify it to their needs. It’s got a thorough and clear definition of what is banned, too, so it should help any argument over pull requests.
Hopefully more projects will outright ban AI generated code (and other AI generated material).
I like this approach, but how can it be enforced? Would you have to read every line and listen to a gut feeling?
Basically the best you can do is continue as normal, and if someone submits something that says it is or obviously is AI, point to this policy and reject it. Just having the policy should be a decent deterrent.
It’s okay, we’re just not going to tell you 👍
People submitting malicious or deceptive code to open source repositories isn’t a new phenomenon. Just know that if you do it with any name in any way attached to your real name, and anyone finds out, you can kiss your reputation in the software dev community goodbye.
Also, if you don’t admit that it’s AI generated, and it turns out to be copyrighted code, you’ll have a fun time in court trying to defend yourself for copyright infringement by admitting to fraud.
Good luck proving it
You’re a special type of uninformed, aren’t you
Same mindset as “You don’t need a perfect lock to protect your house from thieves, you just need one better than what your neighbors have.”
If a vibecoder sees this they will not bother with obfuscation and simply move onto the next project.
hi, i have strong feelings about the use of genai but i come at it from a very different direction (story writing). it’s possible for someone to throw together a 300 page story book in an afternoon - in the style of lovecraft if they want, or brandon sanderson, or dan brown (dan brown always sounds the same and so we might not even notice). now, the assumption that i have about said 300 pager is that it will be dogshit, but art is subjective and someone out there has been beside themselves pining for it.
but this has always been true. there have always been people churning out trash hoping to turn a buck. the fact that they can do it faster now doesn’t change that they’re still in the trash market.
so: i keep writing. i know that my projects will be plagiarized by tech companies. i tell myself that my work is “better” than ai slop.
for you, things are different. writing code is a goal-oriented creative endeavor, but the bar for literature is enjoyment, and the bar for code is functionality. with that in mind, i have some questions:
if someone used genai to generate code snippets and they were able to verify the output, what’s the problem? they used an ersatz gnome to save them some typing. if generated code is indistinguishable from human code, how does this policy work?
for code that’s been flagged as ai generated- and let’s assume it’s obvious, they left a bunch of GPT comments all over the place- is the code bad because it’s genai or is it bad because it doesn’t work?
i’m interested to hear your thoughts
That’s a very good question, and I appreciate it.
I put a lot of this in the reasoning section of the policy, but basically there are legal, quality, security, and community reasons. Even if the quality and security reasons are solved (as you’re proposing with the “indistinguishable from human code” aspect), there are still legal and community reasons.
Legal
AI generated material is not copyrightable, and therefore licensing restrictions on it cannot be enforced. It’s considered public domain, so putting that code into your code base makes your license much less enforceable.
AI generated material might be too similar to its copyrighted training data, making it actually copyrighted by the original author. We’ve seen OpenAI and Midjourney get sued for regurgitating their training data. It’s not farfetched to think a copyright owner could go after a project for distributing their copyrighted material after an AI regurgitated it.
Community
People have an implicit trust that the maintainers of a project understand the code. When AI generated code is included, that may not be the case, and that implicit trust is broken.
Admittedly, I’ve never seen AI generated code that I couldn’t understand, but it’s reasonable to think that as AI models get bigger and more capable of producing abstract code, their code could become too obscure or abstracted to be sufficiently understood by a project maintainer.
This is super cool!
Did want to offer one language critique, it’s easy to jump to the word human as the opposite of AI-made, but there are a lot of therians and adjacent entities in the software engineering space. It would be wonderful to find language that is a pro-“human” policy that avoids that word and instead focuses on people of all sorts of identities so as not to be othering.
Sounds strange to some I’m sure, but this has been coming up more and more with coworkers I’ve had across several companies. It’s kind of like moving from “he or she” to “they”, a great example is the writings of beeps a prominent software engineer on the GOV.UK site and its accessibility https://beeps.website/about/nonhuman/
Regardless if any changes are made thanks for reading and your policy writeup, again very cool :D
I would be fine to include more inclusive language, except that I want to be in line with the wording the US Copyright Office uses, as a major goal of this policy is to ensure that every contribution is copyrightable. They specifically use the word human, and go so far as to say that it is only human authorship that can make something copyrightable.
There was a landmark case where a monkey took a selfie, and the courts decided that the picture could not be copyrighted. In the court’s decision, again, it’s specifically “human” authorship that was the requirement for copyright.
…
- https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
In my opinion, “person” would be a better term to use, since the personhood of the author is really what matters, but since this is meant to provide legal protection, I’m pushed toward the term “human”. Also, “person” could be confused with the concept of a “legal person”, which includes corporations. A corporation itself cannot be an author, but it can own copyrights.
Maybe I should add this to a portion near the bottom of the page to provide the reasoning behind sticking to the term, despite the desire to be inclusive.