Chezmoi introduces ban on LLM-generated contributions
chezmoi.io
chezmoi.io
And corresponding discussion: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/4010
Maintainer sounds angry
Yikes. If maintainers want to ban people for wasting their time, that's great, but considering how paranoid people have gotten about whether something is from an LLM or not, this seems heavy-handed. There needs to be some kind of recourse. How many legitimate-but-simply-wrong contributors will be banned due to policies like this?
As it stands, a potential contributor couldn’t even use basic tab completion for even a single line of code. That’s… certainly a choice, and one that makes me less confident in the project’s ability to retain reliable human contributors than would otherwise be the case.
> I will update chezmoi's contribution guide for LLM-generated content to say simply "no LLM-generated content is allowed and if you submit anything that looks even slightly LLM-generated then you will be immediately be banned."
They'll be taking the AI contributions if AI contributions were useful. The fundamental problem is that AI output is still mostly just garbage.
Am I now assured that the copyright is mine if the code is generated by AI? Worldwide? (or at least North America-EU wide)?
Do projects still risk becoming public domain if they are all AI generated?
Does anyone know of companies that have received *direct lawyer* clearance on this, or are we still at the stage "run and break, we'll fix later"?
Maybe having a clear policy like this might be a defense in case this actually becomes a problem in court.
I think the position has shifted to "let's pretend this problem doesn't exist because the AI market is too big to fail"
lol,
l m a o,
essentially people who use LLMs have been betting that courts will rule on their favour, because shit would hit the fan if it didn't.
The courts however, have consistently ruled against AI-generated content. It's really only a matter of time until either the bubble bursts, or legislation happens that pops the bubble. Some people here might hope otherwise, of course, depending on reliant they are on the hallucinating LSD-ridden mechanical turks.
Have they? I only heard of courts ruling it is fair use.
It's pretty unclear to me where this stands right now. In the USA there are high profile examples of the US copyright office saying purely AI-generated artwork isn't protected by copyright: https://www.theverge.com/news/602096/copyright-office-says-a...
But there's clearly a level of human involvement at which that no longer applies. I'm just not sure if that level has been precisely defined.
No, they haven't consistently “ruled against AI generated content”.
In fact, very few cases involving AI generated content or generative AI systems have made it past preliminary stages, and the rulings that have been reached, preliminary and otherwise, are a mixed bag. Unless you are talking specifically about copyrightability of pure AI content, which is really a pretty peripheral issue.
> It's really only a matter of time until either the bubble bursts, or legislation happens that pops the bubble.
The bubble bursting, as it is certain to do and probably fairly soon, won’t have any significant impact on the trend of AI use, just as the dotcom bubble bursting didn’t on internet use, it will just represent the investment situation reflecting rather than outpacing the reality.
And if you are focusing on an area where, as you say, courts are consistently ruling against AI content, legislation is unlikely to make that worse (but quite plausibly could make it better) for AI.
Certainly not in the US
Long story short, you can't prevent anyone from using AI slop in any way they want. You would have to keep the slop as a trade secret if you want it to remain intellectual property.
Jan 29th 2025 clarification from US Copyright Office: https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
"It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts."
Anyone seen clarity anywhere on what that actually means, especially for things like code assistance?
Not only is the answer to that no, you have no guarantee that it isn't someone else's copyright. The EU AI Act states that AI providers have to make sure that the output of AI isn't infringing on the source copyright, but I wouldn't trust any one of them bar Mistral to actually do that.
Several of the big LLM vendors offer a "copyright shield" policy to their paying customers, which effectively means that their legal teams will step in to fight for you if someone makes a copyright claim against you.
Some examples:
OpenAI (search for "output indemnity"): https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/
Google Gemini: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/p...
Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot...
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap...
Cohere: https://cohere.com/blog/cohere-intellectual-property
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
--
* lots of opinions of many different parties
* quote: "No court has recognized copyright in material created by non-humans". The problem now becomes how much AI work is influence and what about modifications
* Courts have recognized that using AI as reference and then doing all the work by yourself is copyrightable
* AI can not be considered "Joint work"
* No amount of prompt engineering counts.
* Notable: in case of a hand-drawn picture modified by AI, copyright was assigned exclusively to the originally human hand-drawn parts.
Notable international section:
* Korea allows copyright only on human modifications.
* Japan in case-by-case
* China allows copyright
* EU has no court case yet, only comments. Most of the world is in various levels of "don't really know"
After 40 pages of "People have different opinions, can't really tell", the conclusion section says "existing legal doctrines are adequate", but explicitly excludes using only prompt engineering as copyrightable
The final policy posted contradicts this statement.
EDIT: Looks like the quote you had was for an earlier version of the policy, which was changed because people did not/could not abide by it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669846
You're brushing up against some of the reasons why I am pretty sure policies like this will be futile. They may not diminish in popularity but they will be largely unenforceable. They may serve as an excuse for rejecting poor quality code or code that doesn't fit the existing conventions/patterns but did maintainers need a new reason to reject those PRs?
How does one show that no assistive technologies below some threshold were used?
In this case, you don't:
> immediately be banned without recourse
In other words, if the maintainer(s) think it's LLM-generated, right or wrong, you're banned.
I don't know much about this project, but looking at the diff with their previous policy, it's pretty clear that people were abusing it and not declaring that they use llms, and they don't actually know what they're doing
Sure, a smart guy with a tool can do so much more, but an idiot with a tool can ruin it for everyone.
LLM-generated code can be high quality just as human-generated code can be low quality.
Also, having a "no recourse" policy is a bit hostile to your community. There will no doubt be people who get flagged as using LLMs when they didn't and denying them even a chance to defend themselves is harsh.
Can it really? "You submitted LLM-generated contributions" is also highly subjective. Arguably more so since you can't ever really be sure if somethingi s AI generated while with quality issues there are concrete things you can point to (e.g. it the code simply doesn't work, doesn't meet the contributor guidelines, uses obvious anti-patterns etc.).
https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115241241075258997
So obviously curl doesn't have a blanket ban.
* Any contribution of any LLM-generated content will be rejected and result in
an immediate ban for the contributor, without recourse.> Any contribution of any LLM-generated content will be rejected and result in an immediate ban for the contributor, without recourse.
You can argue it’s unenforceable, unproductive, or a bad idea. But it says nothing about unreviewed code. Any LLM generated code.
I’m not sure how great of an idea it is, but then again, it’s not my project.
Personally, I’d rather read a story about how this came to be. Either the owner of the project really hates LLMs or someone submitted something stupid. Either would be a good read.
> Any contribution of any LLM-generated content
I read this as "LLM-generated contributions" are not welcome, not "any contribution that used LLMs in any way".
More generally, this is clearly a rule to point to in order to end discussions with low effort net-negative contributors. I doubt it's going to be a problem for actually valuable contributions.
> Any contribution of any LLM-generated content will be rejected and result in an immediate ban for the contributor, without recourse.
What about it changes the parent comment?
These people are collaborating in bad faith and basically just wasting project time and resources. I think banning them is very legitimate and useful. It does not matter if you manage to "catch" exactly 100% of all such cases or not.
Moreover, in the case of high-quality contributions made with the assistance of LLMs, I’d rather know which model was used and what the prompt was.
Nonetheless I still understand and respect rejecting these tools, as I said in my first comment.
No, it's not. You can read the rule as "If it's obvious enough your code has been LLM-generated, you will get banned" if you feel like the conciseness of the current rule makes you uneasy about using Copilot.
Besides, I suspect in the maintainer's case, banning unreviewed LLM contributions is effectively congruent to banning all LLM contributions.
If you think the rule is unfair towards LLMs because they can do such good, feel free to open a good, clean, useful PR clearly stating how you used the LLM to generate code.
When autocomplete shows you options, you can choose any of the options blindly and obviously things will fail, but you can also pick right method to call and continue your contribution.
When it comes to LLM generated content, its better if you provide guidelines for contribution rather than banning it. For example:
* if you want to generate any doc use our llms_doc_writing.txt
* for coding use our llms_coding.txtCoding guidelines generally are, by design.
> * if you want to generate any doc use our llms_doc_writing.txt
That's exactly what the project is providing here. The guidelines for how to use LLMs for this project are "don't".
You say "generally better to", but that depends on what you're trying to achieve. Your suggestion is better if you want to change how people use LLMs, the project's is better if the project is trying to change whether people use LLMs.
You can similarly ban code written using IntelliJ IDEA and accept only code written using vim or VS Code, but you wouldn't even know if it was written in IDEA or VSCode.
Saner guideline would be:
* before submitting your LLM generated code, review your code
* respect yours and our time
* if LLM spit out 1k line of code, its on you to split it and make it manageable for us to review, because humans review this code
* if we find that you used LLM but wasn't respectful to our community by not following above, please f.... off from our community, and we will ban you
* submitting PR using solely automated PR slop generators will be banned foreverTo give another example of what is impossible to perfectly detect but still reasonable to prohibit: most projects have a (written or unwritten) requirement of "don't copy code from other projects without respecting their license". There's no reliable way to perfectly detect that someone copied a pile of code from one of their company's proprietary projects, or from some Open Source project under a different license or without attribution. But it's still reasonable for projects to prohibit such "contributions".
of course its their guideline, but guideline sounds more like fighting against progress.
Imagine these:
* we ban cars in our farm
* we ban autocomplete, because it makes you stupid
* we ban airplanes, because its not normal for people to fly
* we ban chemistry, because they feel like witches
* we ban typography, because people can use it for propaganda against us
Then before submitting if I ask an LLM to review my code and it proposes a few changed lines that are more efficient. Should I then
- Leave my less efficient code unchanged?
- Try to rewrite what was suggested in a way that’s not too similar to what the LLM suggested?
Unreviewed is a key word here.
Any contribution of any LLM-generated content will be rejected and result in an immediate ban for the contributor, without recourse.
It's a one time tax you pay sure, but after the ban at least you know you'll never deal with that use again. And a lot of these contributions come from the same people.
Anyone feeling the same? That they're not for humans to see?
Vibe coding is great for local tools where security isn't a concern and where it is easy for the user to verify correctness. It is when people want to do that professionally, on software that actually needs to work, that it becomes a massive ethical problem.
Personally it's like looking at a ransom note made up of letters cut out of magazines & having people tell me how beautiful the handwriting is.
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make a contribution then you must say so in your contribution and you must carefully review your contribution for correctness before sharing it. If you share un-reviewed LLM-generated content then you will be immediately banned.
...and the new one:
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make any kind of contribution then you will immediately be banned without recourse.
Looking at twpayne's discussion about the LLM policy[1], it seems like he got fed up with people not following those instructions:
> I stumbled across an LLM-generated podcast about chezmoi today. It was bland, impersonal, dull, and un-insightful, just like every LLM-generated contribution so far.
> I will update chezmoi's contribution guide for LLM-generated content to say simply "no LLM-generated content is allowed and if you submit anything that looks even slightly LLM-generated then you will be immediately be banned."
[1]: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/4010#discussi...
Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of behavior people have been losing their minds about lately with regards to Codes of Conduct.
Fixed those replies, thanks for flagging.
OTOH, do you think a diagonal-lined-background on the removed side would work better? like striped light and dark red, vs solid green. I don't think I've seen anything do different than "red/green background of similar lightness", which is sorta surprising...