As I have previously expressed, I am firmly against allowing AI contributions to our project mainly due to ethics reasons. In my opinion, we as a quite political project, that tries to radically rethink social media as a self-governed, community-led project out of fascists control, can’t simply put our head in the sand and ignore what is happening around us. At the end of the day, AI is mainly a tool for capitalists to take all of our hard work, strip it of all of it’s intent and meaning and reproduce it without paying us a dime or even acknowledge where it came from. We as free software devs should value and appreciate each others hard work, not just exploit it without permission. There is already projects to “free” GPL licenced code, by just reproducing it with AI to not have to abide by it’s terms. Additionally, AI significantly harms the people (that are hired to filter and fine tune AIs for inhumane pay) and the environment. Producing code with AI makes us understand our code less, there is a huge difference between actively writing code and checking code, someone (or something) else produced. This will inevitably lead to worse, more insecure code, even if experienced devs use it. AI can also make developers dependent on it, as we loose the understanding of the nitty-gritty details over time, because we don’t have to think about them anymore. This is actually exactly, what the companies are designing it for. We should foster a strong developer community, that is able to properly maintain this codebase independently from any AI. Because AI can’t stay this cheap, and if we depend on it to much, that might fuck us over. Due to all of these reasons and more, I don’t think of AI as a neutral “tool” as Linus Torvalds sees it. A tool isn’t necessarily neutral, a nuclear bomb is also just a tool. I think it is increasingly important morally, but also practically for our long term survival as a project, to explicitly reject the use of this tooling for producing code or participating in discussion. This is also not some wild, out there take, quite a few projects have taken this step and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. An example, I could think of is servo (https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started). I know, this would be hard to enforce, but it’s also about taking a stand and maybe making some people think twice about making a lazy slop contribution. This shouldn’t come at the expense of people making real contributions of course. If were not really sure, we should give people the benefit of the doubt, because having to prove that you really made the code would also be really annoying. But we could still stop the worst, most obvious cases. And it would be a step in the right direction, I think.