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Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

pcgamer.com

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Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#11

Post by Cthulhu_ »

TekMol wrote: post #4

Why base the decision on what tools are used by the author and not on the quality of their past contributions?

Because it's not about the tool or the quality of the past contributions, but the quality of the current contribution. It's not new either, it's "show me the code" - it doesn't matter who you are, what you say, what you claim to have achieved in the past, the only thing that matters right now is this particular merge request and code.

I don't think the problem is the (AI generated) code per se, but as the article mentions, it's the human interaction. A reviewer can spend hours on reviewing the code and leaving feedback to the author, but if the author just feeds it into an AI (or worse, it's automatically fed into it) and processes it within seconds, only to start with a blank slate for a next change, what's the point of putting in all that effort?

Humans can learn and adapt, AIs can... ingest more stuff into their context, I suppose, but it's been proven that things break down if they have too much stuff in said context, and said context is limited.

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#15

Post by preisschild »

superb_dev wrote: post #6
TekMol wrote: post #4

Why base the decision on what tools are used by the author and not on the quality of their past contributions?

If your contributions are genuinely indistinguishable from AI code, then this shouldn’t affect you. There would be no way to enforce it

There is legally. Make sure they sign the DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin). They will fail at the first paragraph

(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file; [...]

https://developercertificate.org/

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#16

Post by ivorius »

TomasBM wrote: post #7

It's a fair policy. Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I can only imagine how frustrating this can get in open projects that get a lot of contributions. However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policie…

> - Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.

From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.

> Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments

That would be a dream.

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#18

Post by TomasBM »

manvel_hn wrote: post #3

There are some curated lists of no-AI software. Would be nice to have an index / plot of how that changes in time. https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

Interesting initiative. What are the guiding reasons behind these lists?

I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it.

Also, even if you avoid AI-generated slop, you can't really avoid the human-generated or human+AI-generated slop that passes your filters.

Still, I can definitely think of good non-functional reasons: provenance, accountability, proof-of-work, encouraging people to write code themselves, empirically tracking how humans develop codebases, etc.

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