“‘We Permit the Use of AI, but […]’: The Landscape of AI Policies in Popular Open Source Projects” (by Hora, Robbes, and @zacchiro; preprint)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07542
The study was conducted on the 2,000 most popular GitHub projects, plus “36 well-known projects”.
83% of the policies therein allow or encourage genAI use, half of which require disclosure of genAI use.
This is an interesting and important study, and it raises questions.
🧵
First, how representative are the chosen projects?
My intuition is that projects that choose to be hosted on GitHub are more likely to accept genAI-produced contributions due to:
- political positioning (more “open source” than “user empowerment”, did not follow the call of @conservancy to #GiveUpGitHub);
- the fact that GitHub is where it all started with the release of Copilot;
- the origins of these projects (Web development is well represented, desktop and systems software less so).