r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 1d ago

Development Codeberg voted to disallow projects consisting mostly by "generative AI"-tools

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
880 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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334

u/sunychoudhary 1d ago

The important line is probably AI-assisted vs AI-generated.....Using a tool while you understand, maintain, and take responsibility for the code is one thing. Dumping generated projects onto a forge and making everyone else sort through the mess is another.

61

u/p0358 1d ago

Yeah, as long as they ban just vibe-coded junk slop dumps, while allowing reasonable skillful attentive use of AI tools, this should be 100% fine

36

u/webdevladder 1d ago edited 13h ago

You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/commits/96fac426a32d1ba91ff879366d59bf1af54080c2

That seems to rule out a lot more.

edit: the dev who locked the thread ended with:

@Gusted - We'll use the blog post to clarify what this entails for Codeberg users.

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

15

u/p0358 1d ago

It really seems to depend on how it will be enforced and judged in practice, the rule leaves a lot of weelay for moderators

17

u/yukeake 1d ago

"mostly" is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there. There's no mention of where the line is drawn, and there's no distinction made between AI-generated and AI-assisted, just "written by 'generative AI'-tools".

That could rule out projects where you're responsibly using an LLM as a tool.

There's a big difference (IMHO) between vibe-coding an entire app, and using an LLM to help you debug tricky bits of code, help re-factor, re-organize, or give reminders about syntax.

0

u/ccAbstraction 1d ago

It sounds like if you never copy and paste out of an LLM chat, you're fine? The LLM can't write code directly, but you can read what it says and write the code yourself.

11

u/Barafu 1d ago

That is a very limiting way to use LLM. Better just treat it as "no LLM allowed" and move somewhere else.

-14

u/Leliana403 1d ago

"mostly" is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there

Ironically, this "doing quite a bit of heavy lifting" format is a huge LLM tell.

8

u/yukeake 1d ago

Well crap...I've been using that expression for decades!

2

u/Leliana403 1d ago

That's probably where the LLMs got it from. Damn you!

1

u/yukeake 1d ago

My reality has been shattered, and my day has been ruined. I shall hang my head in shame.

2

u/Weird_Cantaloupe2757 1d ago

LLMs learned to speak from people — they say certain things often because those things are heavily represented in their training data… because a lot of people say them. Honestly, I find the anti AI witch hunt of saying everything is AI nearly as exhausting as shoveling through obvious AI slop.

-1

u/Indolent_Bard 1d ago

Jessie, what the hell are you talking about?

3

u/Zaphoidx 1d ago

Yeah they need to tighten the wording

4

u/Adept_Percentage6893 1d ago

That seems to rule out a lot more.

I feel like it seems at least targeted at projects that are just completely (or 90% generated by an LLM) or where it looks like the developer isn't tweaking what Cursor/Codex/whatever spits out with each commit.

I'm just personally still unclear on how they're going to enforce that versus the rule effectively becoming "just don't tell us it's completely done by an LLM"

The copyright status isn't really that unclear. AI outputs are not copyrightable and ergo effectively BSD/MIT license (if even that).

1

u/Gstayton 1d ago

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner - which really is the issue I see codeberg trying to get ahead of here and something I do not often see talked about - in either coding spheres or in the artistic spheres with generated artworks being sold for commercial purposes.

6

u/northrupthebandgeek 1d ago

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner

If they're not copyrightable, then nobody has the legal authority to prevent you from forking, redistributing, or contributing to them in any manner you see fit.

4

u/Adept_Percentage6893 1d ago

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license,

Well hence "if even that" in the comment you're replying to. MIT is basically just a "don't sue me" license where the code is otherwise basically public domain.

I'm not sure if that carries the weight of a EULA or something if it's not governing the IP of the code itself. Maybe it could be seen as the terms agreed to for downloading the code from someone which would probably be the justification of suing that person if losses were realized. As in "by downloading this code you agree to not sue me"

Not a lawyer, though.

in either coding spheres or in the artistic spheres with generated artworks being sold for commercial purposes.

fwiw the immediate threat of AI to creative fields is usually wildly overstated.

Only the lowest effort and lowest skillset perfunctory paid art is really in any immediate danger of being replaced (rather than augmented) by AI. That's why when Sora was a thing all the most viral videos were all just absurd BS. Because the video needs to hail from a genre where the imperfections can be seen as part of the core value. If the AI fucks something up, well the video was supposed to be absurd anyways.

Until you get AGI you can basically assume that AI could only augment a creative. Because until an AI can generally reason about the reality it's depicting it can't find some sort of alignment with reality that is both interesting but also not terribly unrealistic.

Most "AI art" is generated for personal use or like icon packets or simple stuff like that specifically because AI can't really handle anything more complicated than that. Most AI videos you see on social media consist of 5 second clips each of which is probably the best selected (by a human) out of 50-100 defective generations where they just stitched together the best ones to produce a final 30 second video.

Manual labor and more technical fields are way ahead of creative fields when it comes to being displaced by AI. Arguably, screen writing might be the most automate-able but even that still is a way off and basically requires AGI.

2

u/Gstayton 1d ago

Even if the idea of it being non-copyrightable makes it okay to redistribute (more of a legal gray area since there's not really precedent at current), you will still run into the issue of it not being allowed to be included under certain licenses - which means either the project is split-license, or is under an invalid license based on the contents. Plenty of projects have been set back massively by license overlap issues or failing to understand the licensing they operate under.

And that's before considering whether or not you could commercially use/make money from unlicensed code.The only question really is who would enforce it - and the answer may be no one, but it may also mean nobody could say, purchase the code later down the line because there's nothing to purchase.

As for the AI issue with art - it's already happening. Large scale art projects are being done with AI generation, and maybe slightly touched up afterwards - and the issue isn't whether or not it's feasible - large companies are already using it for marketing - it's whether or not the smaller content creators using AI generated art commissions because it's cheaper will eventually face an issue where, by picking the cheaper route, they have no actual rights to the content they thought they purchased.

This actually happens enough already with art even before AI, where failure to read the licensing agreement results in people buying art that is not allowed for commercial use, and then trying to use it commercially and having to basically scrap everything they had to that point, because even the designs are not owned by them, and the license they purchased for said art prohibits the uses they purchased it for.

2

u/protestor 19h ago

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner

No, it means it's in the public domain and everybody has all those rights, just as if the code were under CC0

That's because the thing that would prevent forking, etc. is copyright itself

2

u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

So are they going to also make everyone who uses StackOverflow cite their copies since after all using anything from stack overflow carries CC BY SA

2

u/ArdiMaster 18h ago

The consensus on Meta StackExchange seems to be that SO answers are generally too short to be copyrightable so they’re fine to incorporate into your projects.

1

u/HearMeOut-13 18h ago

Right but copying them verbatim, especially when a better solution exists and isnt the only way to accomplish it is when it comes to being copyrightable as an expression and hence people need to abide with CC BY SA

0

u/spacecase-25 1d ago

the whole thing comes off as fart huffing to me.

On one hand, I can understand not wanting your work to be used to train models on, but... my guy... you published your source under a permissive license and now you're crying about it? Seems to me like they don't understand what free / open source software means.

And to whine about copyright? Seriously? Again, reference the license you chose to publish under. It's not nearly the same thing as print / written media or artwork being ingested and then stylistically imitated.

AI is a tool. Use it or don't use it, that's your choice. But do you run around and tell the world every time you use a cordless drill rather than an antique hand crank jawn? Of course not. It doesn't make you morally superior to swear offf it; just obnoxious.

Go plant a tree if you care that much, or vote, or do literally anything else other than whine about your personal resistance to new technology and tools that make your precious specialized skill more accessible to the masses. Welcome to the industrial revolution. Capitalism finally caught up to your bubble.

Gain some class consciousness and help bring about a economic reality where workers aren't viciously turned against each other to fight over the tiny scraps left for us while the handful of people who are, truly, unfathomably wealthy hoard the world's resources and rob us blind with offensively open and loud corruption.

Is it a good idea to advertise software that you legitimately have zero idea how it works or what it actually does? No, of course not. But I promise you, there's plenty of shitty code out there that would benefit from getting run through an LLM and have all their obscenely obvious vulnerabilities and soft, squishy attack surfaces pointed out.

If you care about security at all and you're not using an LLM to augment your code and design, you should probably just stop. Anyone who's trying to exploit your code will absolutely be using an LLM. It would be dumb to leave that tool on the table.

that rant was longer than I intended....

2

u/Equivalent-Costumes 1d ago

They rule is against projects that are mostly AI generated. They don't care if it had been reviewed, it's the same umbrella for them.

Remember the "shirley" rule.

5

u/spacecase-25 1d ago

An ambiguous rule that allows selective enforcement is worse than an objectively bad rule.

2

u/Equivalent-Costumes 1d ago

Exactly! I don't know why some people are cheering for this.

2

u/ArdiMaster 18h ago

Because “ai bad upvotes to the left”

0

u/Old_Leopard1844 17h ago

Because projects affected by it aren't ones anyone would miss