AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case IP ownership will probably be split between songwriter and performer depending on their agreement).

(Not an IP lawyer myself so someone can correct me.)

Furthermore, in countries where I know how it works as a venue owner you pay the rights organization a fixed sum per month or year and you are good to go and play any track you want. It thus makes no difference to you whether you play the original or a cover.

Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

> It's parasitism of art

If we assume covers are parasitism of art, by that logic would your comment, which is very similar to dozens I have seen on this topic in recent months, be parasitism of discourse?

Jokes aside, a significant number of covers I have heard at cafes over years are actually quite decent, and I would certainly not call that parasitic in any way.

Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP, insert itself as a middleman and arbiter for information access, devalue art for profit, etc., I am not sure they are even close in terms of the scale of parasitism.

Two weeks ago someone asked me to review a PR, which I did pointing out some architectural concerns. The code was not necessarily bad, but it added boilerplate to a point it required some restructuring to keep the codebase maintainable. I couldn't care less if it was written by AI or not in this case, it was not necessarily simple but was straightforward.

It took considerable effort to conjure a thoughtful and approachable description of the problem and the possible solutions. Keep in mind this is a project with considerable traction and a high amount of contributions are from enthusiasts. So having a clear, maintainable and approachable codebase is sometimes the most important requirement.

They asked for a second pass but it took two weeks for me to get around it, in the meantime they sent 3 different PRs, one closed after the other. I found it a bit strange, then I put some effort to review the last iteration. It had half baked solutions where for example there would be state cleanup functions but state was never written in the first place, something that would never go through normally, I gave the benefit of the doubt and pointed it out. I suspected it was AI generated most likely.

Then they showed me another variation of the PR where they implement a whole different architecture, some incredibly overengineered fluent interface to resolve a simple problem with many layers of indirection that reflects complete indifference to the more nuanced considerations relevant to the domain and project, that I tried to impair. The code might work, but even if it does it's obvious that the change is a net negative to the project.

What I suspected indeed was the case, as they finally disclosed the use of AI, but that is not necessarily the problem, as I hope to convey. The problem is that I was unable to gauge the submitters commitment to perform the humble job of _understanding_ what I proposed. The proposal, in the end, just becoming mere tokens for inclusion into a prompt. Disclosure wouldn't necessarily have caused me to not take the PR seriously, instead I would invested my time in the more productive effort of orienting the submitter on the tractability of achieving their goal.

I would rather have known they didn't intend or gauged their capacity beforehand. It would have been better for both of us: they would have had their initial iteration merged (which was fine, I would just have shrugged the refactor for another occasion) and I wouldn't have lost time.

I know their intent is to push the project forward and well-meaning, I don't care about whether they are vibe-coding. I care about knowing they are vibe-coding so I can assist them to vibe-code in a way they can actually achieve their goal, or help them realize early that they lack the capacity to contribute (not of their own fault necessarily, maybe they just require orientation on how to reason about problems and solutions or their use of the tools).