Mastodawn

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@nedbat/116133445557306539

I got Ned's point, but I don’t think we can treat Claude (or similar tools) at the same level as a person.

We've never added tools (e.g. isort, Black, Ruff, ...) as co-authors of commits, even when they generated 100% of a commit.

Listing Claude as a co-author of a commit put it the same level as a person, but it's a tool.

The author of a commit is a person responsible for the code they submit, without shifting that responsibility to the tool, or worse, to the project maintainers.

#FOSS #AI

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Paolo Melchiorre Feb 26

After thinking a bit more about Ned’s post and the discussion here, it really felt like the right moment to make expectations around AI-assisted contributions clearer in Django.

So I opened a proposal to add an AI/LLM contribution policy.

The idea isn’t to police tools, but to keep responsibility clearly human and reduce ambiguity for contributors and maintainers.

If you’re interested, have a look and share your thoughts:
https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/proposal-add-an-ai-llm-contribution-policy-to-django/44298

Proposal: Add an AI/LLM Contribution Policy to Django

If you use AI-generated content, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. When coding, if you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on the entire codebase. This means copyright notices and even licenses that folks put on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain. Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB1...

Django Forum

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Noah K Feb 26

@paulox I am not a lawyer but I think you should probably have one review this before making any decisions. As far as I am aware, "who unequivocally owns the copyright" is simply not how this works in the US at this time. LoC and the copyright office have been very clear that works generated by LLMs or related tech do not qualify for copyright so no one owns it.

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Paolo Melchiorre Feb 26

Thanks @coderanger but the wording I quoted comes from Hynek’s `attrs` project, and he isn’t a US citizen, so US-specific copyright rules weren’t necessarily the reference point there.

That said, my intent isn’t to copy that document verbatim. I’m using the `attrs` AI policy as inspiration and a starting point, and any policy for Django would need to be adapted accordingly, especially since Django is a US-based foundation and the legal framing will likely need to be different.

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Noah K

@paulox I am far less knowledgeable about EU law but my understanding is it’s much the same there. The UK does have explicit provisions for non human authored works but the EU has voted to continue requiring human authorship for copyright protection.