[QGIS-Developer] Floating an idea: ban AI based contributed from non-core developers?

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi,

There is no question that carelessly throwing low quality AI products into
the PR queue for review is offensive. I am absolutely with you Nyall, that
the current situation where so much less effort is required to produce
content than to check for its quality is a bad situation for maintainers
(as well as the other industries that you mentioned).

However, there is no guarantee that only such pull requests are flagged.
E.g. just from the disclaimer checkbox in the PR template, it is not
possible to deduce if it's a careless low quality product. I've seen this
checked for commit message proposals from github copilot. It's also often
added without any discussion about the provenance with the contributor. I
think it is okay to use a label like this, but then I think the formulation
should be compatible with "in dubio pro reo".

The new proposal by Even is not dismissive for pull requests that deserve a
second look (such as apparently the two currently open pull requests with
this label 65573 and 65630). For pull requests that clearly qualify as
slop, I agree with Greg and we should rather close them sooner than later.

Kind regards
Matthias

On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 9:08 PM Greg Troxel via QGIS-Developer <
qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Advance warning: Emotional reply.
> >
> > Why, as a society, can we recognise that it's generally a BAD THING that
> AI
> > has destroyed the livelihoods of graphic artists and musicians, but are
> > BLIND to the impact it is having on professional software developers? Why
> > MUST we be welcoming and warm to the people who are vandalising OUR form
> of
> > art, and making it impossible for us to continue in the industry that
> we've
> > devoted our lives to?
> >
> > I'm sorry, but I have absolutely NO sympathy for a new ai-slop
> contributor
> > to open source. Just like I have no sympathy toward someone flooding
> > spotify with AI written music, making it impossible for real artists to
> > make a living.
> >
> > Screw that. It's already thankless enough to be an open source
> maintainer.
> > Now it's even worse.
> >
> > Look after the people who have devoted YEARS of their lives to open
> source,
> > or you'll lose those.
> >
> > /me out
> >
> > Nyall
>
> Before I saw your reply, I was going to comment that the "it's unkind to
> label low-quality LLM-generated content as AI slop" statement, while
> coming from a place of wanting to be welcoing, is missing the point that
> submitting low-qualitty LLM-generated content is an offense against the
> community.  We would not be welcoming to people posting intentionally
> offensive comments (e.g., gratuitous off-topic racial epithets) to
> issues, and we wouldn't be talking about how it was unwelcoming to just
> delete them and ban the submitter.   This is less different than people
> that think AI is ok think.
>
> It is possible that some people submitting AI slop don't undersetand
> that it is AI slop, and don't understand the harms that LLM-generated
> content does to projects.  Once there's a clear place to point to --
> which explains that the submitter should not again submit other
> LLM-generated content -- it might be better to just close with a
> pointer, rather than label AI and leave open.
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