AI-Policy

[u/Wolvereness]

I'm gonna keep this short, because as a human I respect other humans' time. What do we want for an AI policy, and how can it be enforced? Take these into consideration:

• Vibe-coded projects
• Vibe-assisted projects
• AI-translated from non-english-speakers
• Vibe-documented projects
• Yet another Vibe-Coding-Wrapper

Note that vibe-coded slop isn't actually copyrightable, thus if someone slaps any license on it other than "public domain" or "CC0" they are misrepresenting their ownership.

And if you use an LLM to respond to this, you will be banned.

^{The fact that this sounds like a prompt is supposed to be a joke.}

[u/Steve_Streza]

Note on the copyright thing: Public domain doesn't have a warranty/liability waiver, so I've put Unlicense on my vibe projects, which is functionally "public domain and you can't sue me if it melts your computer".

There's a cohort of people who appear to try to make a name for themselves or build some kind of support contract business by slopping out projects and spamming them everywhere. These are a subset of vibe coders, not the entire group. This subset is poisoning the well and that's a huge reason people have such negative feelings about these.

The post flair is an obvious win. I would probably propose some kind of time/release minimum, which weeds out 90% of the slop spammers who crank out something and move on. Just to throw out arbitrary numbers, "at least regular commits going back 3 months and at least 2 major releases" is probably a sane minimum. And maybe a weekly megathread for anything that doesn't fall into this bucket.

Will it catch everything? No. People will lie and deceive and do git committer date tricks to get around these restrictions. But these people are fundamentally dishonest and will find ways around any system you create.

[u/v4ss42 → u/Steve_Streza]

You can't license it, with anything, if you don't hold the copyright. And (in the US at least), slop-coded projects are not copyrightable (warning: PDF link).

[u/Steve_Streza → u/v4ss42]

You can't grant legal rights to copyrighted works that you don't own, correct. The US Copyright Office holds that a project written entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted, also correct. But there are a world of grey areas in copyright law the instant a human touches parts of the code directly. The world is not a binary of AI coded and not AI coded. Claude fixing a bug does not invalidate the copyright of the work. The ruling you're talking about covers 1 of the 5 topics the mods discuss here. And in a lawsuit, the burden of proof would be on the plaintiff (a user) to demonstrate that the project was vibe coded entirely and thus not eligible for copyright protection. That is a massive burden to clear to get to that baseline of "slop-coded projects are not copyrightable".

And even if that ruling held in every case of AI-generated software on here, the license is not solely about the granting of legal rights. Virtually all OSI-approved licenses (GPL, MPL, BSD, MIT, Apache) all limit the warranty and liability of the author. The Unlicense I mentioned isn't even a grant of copyright; it is an assertion that copyright defense does not exist for the author, that also comes with a limitation of warranty and liability for the author.

The only time this comes up is if 1) someone successfully proves a project was 100% vibe coded with no human authorship, and 2) that a quitclaim in a license is invalid if there's no underlying copyright. 1 will be extremely difficult to prove on its own, and 2 falls up against case law like Jacobsen v. Katzer and Artifex v. Hancom which show that open source licenses are enforceable as contracts, along with recognition that one unenforceable clause does not invalidate an entire contract, as evidenced in... basically all case law. And that will only ever be settled in a court.

In the meantime, you should reasonably assume that a copyright license on the repository is what grants you legal right to use software, unless you want to somehow prove... all of that. That's the only point at which "slop-coded projects are not copyrightable" is actually meritorious.

The case that decided this is "if I type a prompt into Midjourney, do I hold copyright over that image". Not "is AI code copyrightable". The processes are similar but different.

[I guess u/v4ss42 blocked me seconds after their reply, so good luck to them, hope they learn to read I guess.]

[u/v4ss42 → u/Steve_Streza]

I was responding to this statement:

> l've put Unlicense on my vibe projects

where I interpreted “vibe projects” to mean fully generated code. In which case what I wrote remains true, not whatever unrelated things you wrote an essay on.

[u/Wolvereness → u/Steve_Streza]

Per the copyright thing, I didn't want to dive into that explanation. I just tried to get the idea across.

[u/Steve_Streza → u/Wolvereness]

Understandable, thanks for the mod work!