On 10/14/25 6:15 PM, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

Hi Carlos,

On Tue, Oct 14, 2025 at 05:54:41PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

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I've already been DDoSed in my own home server by AI crawlers (which is
the reason I decided to move the HTTPS server to port 80, just to break
links and stop the madness.  I could install Anubis, but I'll resist for
some time.

It does not logically follow that because there are bad actors we should
ban a particular tool that the bad actors use.

It's not the main reason, but it's something I wanted to note in the
discussion.

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So far, I haven't noticed any contributors using AI.  Probably, the
combination of relatively few people contributing documentation,
combined with still working on a mailing list, has helped us avoid the
wave of AI contributions.

However, it's better to take preventive measures.  AI is entirely banned
in this project.  The guidelines are clear and concise.

Why?

(1) Document intent.

I don't support a ban without a justification.

That justification can be on moral or ethical grounds, or even on the
grounds of energy used vs outcomes achieved.

Okay, I'll add some generic justification.

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(2) Document acceptable use.

We should also talk about where it would be acceptable to use such tools,
for example could the tool check spelling, or grammar?

I explicitly want to disallow such uses.  I think using AI to lint code
(documentation or C source code) is dangerous, as it puts trust in the
AI system to find issues.  The AI system might trick you to accidentally
introduce typos or bugs, or it could create a false sense of
correctness or safety.

We're getting into ethical territory here.

What I put my trust in or not, is none of the project's business.

The color of my socks is none of the project's business too.

We should accept contributions that meet our contribution policy?

This includes a clear license, clear and unambiguous copyright,
and a level of quality and correctness that we review with human
reviewers?

Consider QEMU's policy:
https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/devel/code-provenance.html#use-of-ai-generated-content

Likewise Gentoo's policy:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.