QGIS enacts moratorium on AI contributions

the biggest problem I have with "the users" right now is trying to spot issues people are having that actually matter. So many bugs now are just someone with their LLM/fuzzer finding frivilous issues that affect nobody, but the folks doing this are beginning to deploy dark tactics to get their reported issues to look "legit". careful language choices and other github accounts coming in to "agree" they have this issue also. I'm starting to think of how to identify people using "dark" patterns like this and just ban them outright.

It is so sad than any open source project that bans AI is subject to five minutes of hate by the industry influencers.

The same influencers by the way who are just for hire and were preaching DEI and Covid boosters in 2022 but now support Trump, Kushner, BigAI (and local AI as a figleaf).

I think think its a good thing a lot of people are banning AI contributions. This will clearly differentiate and make space for the free market to pick the best winners.

Omarchy is on the opposite spectrum.

Well, it's their choice. If you care about the process - i.e. it's a hobby for you, or a spiritual experience, then it's totally valid to go without AI.

But I feel it's a bit crazy not to use any AI assistance to develop real code these days, if you care about outcome. You can get to result much faster, and have a higher quality solution, if you use it right.

The problem for open source is low quality slop, not AI assistance. Not sure what's the solution though.

Such an awesome way to kill a somewhat useful program. Just keeping putting nails in the coffin. The future is here and it's NOT reverting no matter how much people want to stick their head in the sand.

> QGIS is trusted by organisations because they know they can contribute back, they can hire contributors for support, training and feature. As a community project, this is something we really want to protect

We have gone from "LLM-slop is gonna ruin open source projects" to we wanna "protect" humans so they can make some dough on the side training and stuff. If human coders become the bottleneck in the chain, the solution is obvious and there's only so much protection anyone can do.

And another open source project consigns itself to irrelevance.

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Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN? This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

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Lucky for AI companies that OSS projects are doing this, otherwise where will they get their carefully created training data from? They would be reduced to training off the slop their tools produce! /s

I’ve been able to contribute to projects recently using ai. And another project banned this so I didn’t bother. The second was a bug fix for an issue I was having. The first was a new feature.

Either way my bug got fixed but if a project maintainer doesn’t want it who am I to fight it.

You can always fork it. I suspect my contributions are higher quality because I use different model providers to review each other but whatever.

For an outright ban on "LLM, AI or agent assisted code contributions", they do very little to define what that means. This is a terribly written policy - I sincerely urge the QGIS maintainers to put enforceable guardrails on the definition.

This reminds me of the legal ambiguity behind the GPL and its definition of "derivative work". A careful analysis of the GPL shows that using GPL software doesn't trigger any other clauses. But distribution does. What is the legal definition of distribution? Who knows!?! That's why most software companies have a partial (edit) ban on GPL software. Even companies that are willing to comply with the GPL, they cannot feasibly come into compliance with such a vague definition. So it's safer not to engage.

Same will happen with anti-AI policies. Even contributors who are fully willing to do things "by hand" will start avoiding these projects. No way to know if you'll accidentally run afoul of someone's AI radar. There's nothing to protect enforcement from becoming a witch hunt.