[QGIS-Developer] Tightening AI submission policy?

[Vincent Picavet]

Hello,

Thanks for this proposal, I can only be in favor of a stricter policy.

I would also add a specific item on IP, even if I do not like pushing the burden to contributors while have no way of ensuring IP compliance.

In the line of :

- "By contributing to this project, you are responsible to ensure that you have the corresponding and sufficient intellectual property rights on all contributed code without exception to comply to this project's opensource licences and IP policies. Note that code generated by LLM has a high probability of copyright infringement."

Also a few resources for inspiration. I think if we can reuse other's positions word by word (if the idea is the same), it makes opensource project's position as a community stronger. Maybe we will end up converging towards a kind of standard opensource policy on AI, and that would be good for everyone ( and then one day the opensource world sues proprietary LLMs for copyright infringement, but that's another story).

-  NLnet; Policy on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for NLnet-funded projects : https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/
- Using LLMs Responsibly - Responsible AI Guide : https://responsibleai.guide/
- LLM-gen-AI - Software Freedom Conservancy : https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html

Regards,

Vincent




On 23/06/2026 07:10, Alessandro Pasotti via QGIS-Developer wrote:
> Big +1
>
> It's probably hard to put in clear terms (and forgive my English), but
> I think that the criteria should be even stricter than "contribute
> only what you understand":
>
> "Do not contribute anything that you wouldn't have been fully capable
> of writing on your own without any AI assistance."
>
> or
>
> "Contribute only what you could have done by yourself without any AI
> assistance."
>
> Tthis makes it more likely that you will be able to fix or improve
> your work if needed.
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 1:47 AM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer
> <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>> Hi lists,
>>
>> Following recent discussions and conflict within the PostGIS community, I would like us to consider tightening our AI submission policy to hopefully avoid similar conflict arising in our community.
>>
>> I would propose that we move away from our current (quite permissive) "human in the loop" policy (seehttps://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/blob/master/qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md ) to something more restrictive, such as what the GDAL project has done. Seehttps://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/33399bf734f48a6727050ccd13a43575d43f6bf4/doc/source/community/ai_tool_policy.rst).
>>
>> In short, GDAL's policy is:
>>
>> Contributors can make limited use of LLMs for contributions in GDAL, subject to details mentioned below:
>>
>> - Human contributors must be the primary author(s) of GDAL contributions
>> - All contributions including code, ticket comments, and commit messages should be fully understood by the author(s) submitting them to the project.
>> - Submission of vibe-coded contributions is banned.
>> - LLMs may only be used as an improved auto-completion mechanism, or for repeated tasks (mechanical refactoring) that could potentially be completed with a deterministic algorithm.
>> - Human-coordinated or uncoordinated (OpenClaw, etc) use of agents for submission of contributions to the GDAL repository is banned.
>> - Any LLM usage must be indicated by ticket label, comment, or commit message indication and account for what was written by whom/what.
>> - The contributing human author is ultimately responsible for every line of code, comment, or mailing list interaction they initiate, and all of it is subject to the project's :ref:`code_of_conduct`.
>> - The typical high verbosity of LLM code and text is actively discouraged. More code is more code to maintain. High verbosity contribution (tickets, code, messages, etc) will be seen as indication of LLM-generated content when not labeled otherwise and may be ignored, closed, left unmerged, or removed at maintainers' discretion.
>>
>>
>> I personally think a combination of GDAL policy + borrowing the "contribute only what you understand" term from Godot's current policy (seehttps://contributing.godotengine.org/en/latest/pull_requests/pull_request_guidelines.html#ai-assisted-contributions could be a good step forward. Specifically this clause:
>>
>> Contribute only what you understand
>> Only submit code that you fully understand and are prepared to explain to a maintainer. This especially applies if you implement the idea of another person, copy code from elsewhere, or if you use AI to assist you with your contribution. In all of these cases, you must disclose which part of your submission wasn't fully authored by you.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Nyall
>>
>>
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