Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people wary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.
Not only the contributor has to understand code. There have always been flyby contributers that just add their code and that’s it. So if a PR adds code that cannot be maintained by others it can’t be added. That is part of the review process. That is part of evaluating based on quality. It’s unimportant if a human or an llm wrote something unmaintainable.
The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.
Recommendations for AI usage in Free Software contributions
With these issues in mind, the recently published Recommendations When Using LLM-Backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions by the SFC outlines some of the legal difficulties for copyright and licensing that generative systems have created for software developers who wish to write, maintain, or contribute to Free Software projects.
Notably for the purposes of this article, the SFC recommends the full recording and disclosure of how and when an AI tool was used to assist in the creation of a contribution. As stated by the SFC:
“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these system change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."
Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.
Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.
IANAL but from my naive perspective it might make more sense to not disclose this because no one can prove that something was written by AI if no one discloses it. That means for me that any claims that a certain part cannot be copyrighted are hard or even impossible to make.
Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.
If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people wary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.
FYI it’s wary. Weary means you’re tired. Wary is to beware of something.
Bad LLM code is worse than bad human code. LLMs sanitize out markers that humans use to catch and correct mistakes.
I have experienced both.
Code is a liability. The only thing that balances it out is people who understand the code. The people are the asset.
If you contribute LLM-generated code but not your understanding, you’ve essentially taken out a loan in the maintainers’ names.
Not only the contributor has to understand code. There have always been flyby contributers that just add their code and that’s it. So if a PR adds code that cannot be maintained by others it can’t be added. That is part of the review process. That is part of evaluating based on quality. It’s unimportant if a human or an llm wrote something unmaintainable.
Building tech debt you never pay down is the way you kill open source projects.
The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.
https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
IANAL but from my naive perspective it might make more sense to not disclose this because no one can prove that something was written by AI if no one discloses it. That means for me that any claims that a certain part cannot be copyrighted are hard or even impossible to make.
What wrong things?