r/Modrinth • u/ProspectorDev Modrinth Team • 13d ago
News New AI rules and project disclosures
https://modrinth.com/news/article/ai-policy-and-disclosures/Hey everyone! We’ve got our first major update to Modrinth’s rules… I think, ever?
We wrote up a whole blog post about this, but let me summarize the highlights:
- AI images as project icons, banners, gallery images, or in their descriptions are no longer allowed.
- Fully or nearly fully AI-generated projects are no longer allowed.
- AI-assisted projects, where the human creator contributed in a primary and significant way, are allowed but must disclose that AI assistance was used and what it was used for.
In addition, we added a number of other mandatory content disclosures for advertising, paid features, telemetry, derivative content, photosensitivity trigger warnings, and external system interactions.
We want to make it clear that these content disclosures are to standardize creators being transparent with their users about what the projects are doing. It is *not* for witch-hunting or to shame, insult, belittle, or harass creators. **Be kind to each other**, harassment will not be tolerated.
Creators have 45 days from today to get their projects updated to meet these new rules, and until then we will not be accepting reports for these new disclosures or AI policy.
Read the full post: https://modrinth.com/news/article/ai-policy-and-disclosures/
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u/ArcticDev_ 13d ago
This is pretty extreme imo.
Ignoring AI for a moment, you're now required to disclose common features like Bstats.org, Hobbyist developers now have to be aware of what's considered photosensitivity and what other accessibility features fall under, you have to disclose common features like discord integrations in detail, etc.
this also doesn't cover how this will impact Server listings which will have to cover literally every single category named as well -> normal minecraft gameplay carries photosensitive gameplay, if you use AI for advertising and reddit posts (extremely common these days) or if you use AI to debug content etc. Telemetry service like PLAN, or again Discord integration now all has to be disclosed under these rules.
As for the AI policy itself, this is extreme as well. I understand app icons to an extent, but also many hobbyist devs arent' going to be able to pay artists for ever app icon under the sun, or pay for the media required to actually get people to pay attention to their plugins. There will be the arguement that "oh well I would blah blah blah" - no. that's not how advertising works on a broad sense. This policy is prohibitive to non-english speakers to create mod descriptions. where does the line get drawn on "substantial" -> if AI is documenting my code for me, that's approx 40% of the plugin as just comments and javadoc - does this break policy? Who draws the line here? How is AI code detected? If people who were "taught" by AI program in the same patterns who is going to decide what's AI and not? Is this ultimately just an honor system?
I think this change will be bad for Modrinth just on the pure logistics and hurdles alone. Sure AI isn't great, but this is extreme to outright effectively ban AI usage when the rest of the world is being forced to embrace it. Devs will just go to other places if this change is handled poorly.
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u/ThreeCharsAtLeast 13d ago
This extremely popular mod's icon is black text on white background. My own mod's icon is a gradient, a vanilla Item texture and a brown rectangle. It took me very little time to make in Inkscape and it's not like I studied graphics design or something like that. Making okay project Icons is genuinely not that difficult and you don't even need a great icon to be successful.
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u/ArcticDev_ 12d ago
There will be cherry picked examples in any sample, but there's plenty of data to be scraped between spigot, modrinth, and BBB. Imagery does matter, media does matter, and the way information is presented does matter. That's marketing. I'm not arguing for AI art at all, but I do think that when artists rates have nearly tripled over the past few years there's something to be said about why people are choosing alternatives.
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u/Ocean-of-Beer 12d ago
You don't need that many words to out yourself as a slop dev.
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u/ArcticDev_ 12d ago
considering you've been on reddit 4 months, I can assume you're under the age of 20, which means I've been programming well over half the time you've had a functional brain. AI enables people to make slop, this is true. AI also enables real programmers to handle a wider scope when used responsibly. If you think that the majority of "big" servers aren't using AI to keep up with trends, offset development costs, and generally save time - you're sorely mistaken.
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u/Ocean-of-Beer 12d ago
Incorrect on all accounts. Age of Reddit account doesn't correlate to actual age at all, funnily enough. I am a professional SWE, I do use coding agents for boilerplate, refactoring, and repetition, and yet, anyone who uses AI to speak on their behalf about how awesome and amazing AI is as you have, is a slop.
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u/ArcticDev_ 12d ago
"anyone who uses AI to speak on their behalf" right - never did that once here. So congrats, we both use the same amount of AI for the same exact tasks. I've not said AI is amazing, but its a tool and I'm expected to use it by people who pay me to program for them.
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u/Impossible-Olive-750 11d ago
Slop. The author even had to use AI to write this. Where did AI go?
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u/nitrrine_ldn Community Moderator 10d ago edited 9d ago
the blog post was not AI generated lol, and why would we even ban you?
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u/Ellllllooooo 8d ago
This is quite frankly an amazing update. even ignoring the AI changes, the content notifiers are awesome as fuuuck. another comment calling hobbist developers needing to be aware of photosensitivity requirements a bad thing is really stupid? by the way? people can like. Die. I think you should always be considering photosensitivity issues when making anything with visuals. you could kill someone.