Disallow or discourage use of "AI" tools (Christoph Cullmann)

Justin Zobel justin at 1707.io
Sun May 18 07:58:48 BST 2025


On 17/05/2025 01:40, Christoph Cullmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> just as a concrete example: what to do with
>
> https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/syntax-highlighting/-/merge_requests/698
>
> That is no AI spam but something that doesn't look broken and the submitter did
> do manual work.
>
> Can I now accept that just as MIT?
>
> Greetings
> Christoph

If the contributor cannot tell you the license(s) of the code that was 
used to generate the code, then it's literally gambling that this code 
wasn't taken from another project by Gemini and used without their 
permission or used in a way that violates the license and opens up the 
KDE e.V. to litigation.

This is an absolutely possible scenario if the author happens to look 
around for their code being re-used. KDE e.V. CAN NOT accept AI 
contributions because the source of the code isn't known.

It really scares me that we would even consider accepting this. I fully 
understand that it is impossible to tell if a user is lying about 
generating code with an AI, but we have to at least remove the KDE e.V. 
from possible harm by rejecting code unless it is sourced from a license 
and privacy respecting model. Which I'm sure there are very few of and 
the ones that exist would have very little code as every single piece of 
code would have to be audited by the owner of the model to ensure that 
it can be distributed and used in their software, and that the owners 
accepts this.

Of course, this still all boils down to trusting contributors. They can 
get code from anywhere and claim at as their own. AI just makes it much 
easier for them to do it.

Justin
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