open-slopware/NO_AI_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md

Reaching Out to a Project

Below you'll find a couple of basic templates you can use to reach out to a project in order to politely ask them to consider creating a No AI Policy. We're creating a couple of different templates depending on which angle you think might be most appealing to a given a project. You're also free to combine sections of different templates together to hit many different points in a single post. This is meant to be a starting point, not the final iteration.

Before you proceed, read our Tips for Success.

Would you like to improve these templates or add additional sections? Please feel free to submit a PR to do so and we'll discuss it :)

Tips for Success

• Do this in the public forum, issue tracker, discussions, etc.
  • Avoid using direct messages (otherwise you'd need to share screenshots of your direct message which could cause friction)
  • Avoid using places like discord servers unless that is the ONLY place a project does Issue Triage
• Personalize the template a bit before sending it:
  • Add how long you've been using the software.
  • Add what the project means to you.
• Add the name of the project in the opening
• Add your name at the bottom.
• Be nice! We cannot stress this enough: Be Kind!
  • Do not shame or threaten the project you are reaching out to, especially not with this list.
• You may not want to include every section, depending on the culture surrounding the project you are contacting. Use your best judgement.

Templates

• Appeal to Ethics Template
• Appeal to Code Quality Template
• Appeal to Fear of Legal Ramfification Template

Appeal to Ethics Template

Hello,

I'd like to talk about your AI policy. Below are some reasons why using AI can be harmful:

## Environmental Impact

To start learning a bit more, you can check out the Wikipedia page on the [environmental impact of artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_artificial_intelligence#Individual_level). Here's some more specific sources:

- [MIT News: Generative AI's environmental impact](https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117)

- [MIT Technology Review: We did the math on AI's energy footprint. Here's the story you haven't heard.](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/)

## Effect on Hardware Prices

The demand for construction and outfitting of new data-centers to host AI/LLM compute capacity has overwhelmed global supply and production of multiple hardware components. Memory, Storage, and GPUs have seen massive increases in price for both consumer and enterprise models, upwards of 400% in some cases.

The lack of supply has led large system-builders to purchase production capacity from OEMs well in advance of delivery, leading some manufacturers to end consumer-oriented product lines in favor of enterprise capacity.

The downstream effects for consumers is that nearly all electronic devices which contain memory and storage will see their prices rise and availability decline. Those who already own existing electronics and computer hardware components may also find themselves unable to have their devices repaired or replaced under warranty.

- [The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about](https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage-memory-crisis-price-2026-phones-laptops)

- [Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place](https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-is-already-sold-out-of-hard-drives-for-all-of-2026-chief-says-some-long-term-agreements-for-2027-and-2028-already-in-place)

- [The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market](https://www.howtogeek.com/dont-count-on-hdds-to-save-you-from-rising-storage-costs/)

This has resulted in pricing historically marginalized individuals, who are more likely to have less financial resources, out of learning about computers at home and shrinking the diversity of the computing and programming industry.

## Ties to the War Industry

A lot of AI companies also work directly with nation states for use in their  War Departments, which in turn leads to further AI usage during war and invasions. This is coupled with [NYT: Palantir, Anthropic and small start-ups are generating rewards from their investments in defense tech](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/technology/silicon-valley-war-defense-tech.html).

As another example [NPR: OpenAI announced Pentagon deal after Trump banned Anthropic](https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic-pentagon-openai-ai-weapons-ban) which was due to the USA Department of War [launching an AI acceleration strategy](https://web.archive.org/web/20260113071131/https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4376420/war-department-launches-ai-acceleration-strategy-to-secure-american-military-ai/).

Due to the nature of LLMs being only kind of as good as the data they are trained on, this can lead to additional civilian deaths and housing/infrastructure damage either intentionally or not. Examples:

<details>
  <summary>Content Warning: War details, death</summary>

  - [Gaza: UN experts deplore use of purported AI to commit ‘domicide’ in Gaza, call for reparative approach to rebuilding](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/gaza-un-experts-deplore-use-purported-ai-commit-domicide-gaza-call)
  - [Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes](https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/5/israel_ai)
  - [Microsoft says it provided AI to Israeli military for war](https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-israel-military-gaza-hamas-artificial-intelligence-20b2adb438b39ee9cb6eb2f52c1ae44a)
  - [Google has dropped its promise not to use AI for weapons](https://theconversation.com/google-has-dropped-its-promise-not-to-use-ai-for-weapons-its-part-of-a-troubling-trend-249169)
  - ["We want to use it for everything": How Project Maven became central to America’s AI-powered warfare](https://web.archive.org/web/20260312035736/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/project-maven-ai-us-airstrike-iraq-anthropic-b2929138.html)

</details>

## What You Can Do

I'd like to kindly suggest implementing a strict "No AI" policy. This can also help with what seems to be larger and larger influxes of low quality drive-by PRs by AI agents.

You can find other projects that have taken steps to say no to AI here:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

For a specific policy, I can recommend the following policies for inspiration:

- [wafrn's Contributring Doc](https://codeberg.org/wafrn/wafrn/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)

- [Loupe's Use of Generative AI Policy](https://discourse.gnome.org/t/loupe-no-longer-allows-generative-ai-contributions/27327)

Thank you and kind regards :pray:

Appeal to Code Quality Template

Hello,

I'd like to talk about your AI policy. Below are some reasons why using AI can result in poorer code quality:

## Poor Code Quality

Vibe coding / agentic workflows result in poorer code quality, and relaxed oversight practices. These effects may be compounded by the common practice of using additional LLM-based tooling to provide code-reviews.

* [How I Dropped Our Production Database and Now Pay 10% More for AWS](http://archive.today/2026.03.06-144058/https://alexeyondata.substack.com/p/how-i-dropped-our-production-database)
* [Claude Tested Everything Except the One Thing That Mattered (AI agent refuses to follow explicit instructions to test `createPost()` in increasingly erratic ways)](http://archive.today/2026.03.09-201135/https://christophermeiklejohn.com/ai/claude/2026/03/08/claude-tested-everything-except-the-one-thing-that-mattered.html)
* [Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/3TfgF)
* GitClear has released reports in [2024](https://www.gitclear.com/coding_on_copilot_data_shows_ais_downward_pressure_on_code_quality) and [2025](https://www.gitclear.com/ai_assistant_code_quality_2025_research) indicating a worsening of key code quality metrics correlating with increased LLM adoption.

### Deskilling

There is increasing evidence to show that LLMs negatively impact developers' coding abilities:

* [Brains show less activity when completing tasks with LLMs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872) compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
* [Developers who use early-2025 LLMs](https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/) reported higher subjective performance, but were measured to have lower objective performance. This gap between subjective and objective performance was considered notable.
* In an [Anthropic study](https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills), learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
* [A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender"](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646) to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
* A paper entitled ["AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721) from April 2026 by academics from MIT, Oxford, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon showed alarming evidence that performing a variety of tasks with the help of AI for only 10 minutes causes "inpaired unassisted performance and reduced persistence". The researchers noted that "although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up"; they also pointed out that "these findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning".

### Infosec risks

LLM usage results in massive security holes.

* [Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails](http://archive.today/2026.02.26-153034/https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails)
* [Moltbook's "vibe-coded" breach is the future of security failures](https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/5744310-ai-powered-security-risks/)
* [In a study evaluating over 500k code samples, LLM-generated code was found to contain more high-risk security vulnerabilities than human-generated code](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634)
* [LLMs make up package names, making them vulnerable to incorporating malicious code in "slopsquatting" attacks](https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/) ([Arxiv study](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10279))

## What You Can Do

I'd like to kindly suggest implementing a strict "No AI" policy. This can also help with what seems to be larger and larger influxes of low quality drive-by PRs by AI agents.

You can find other projects that have taken steps to say no to AI here:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

For a specific policy, I can recommend the following policies for inspiration:

- [wafrn's Contributring Doc](https://codeberg.org/wafrn/wafrn/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)

- [Loupe's Use of Generative AI Policy](https://discourse.gnome.org/t/loupe-no-longer-allows-generative-ai-contributions/27327)

Thank you and kind regards :pray:

Appeal to Fear of Legal Ramfification Template

Hello,

I'd like to talk about your AI policy. Below are some reasons why using AI can result in legal trouble in the future:

## Legal Ramifications

LLMs are often trained on, and thus prone to regurgitate (either completely, or in-part), chunks of code that are licensed under terms which have specific legal requirements that a contributor using LLMs may not understand or even be aware of when making a contribution. Regardless of this ignorance, it falls to the repo's owner to comply with the terms of any and all licensed code integrated into their project.

### License Problems

Legal, copyright, and ethics problems arise, especially with copyleft licenses such as the GNU (A/L)GPL. With the "help" of AI the copyleft code may be "license-washed" very easily.

Here are some ongoing problems with AI "license-washing" in the FOSS world:

* `chardet` - used an LLM to rewrite the codebase from the LGPL license to Expat/MIT (and later 0-BSD) license, violating the (L)GPL.
  * relicensed release: <https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0>
  * original author's concerns: <https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327>
  * "consumer's" concerns: <https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/331>

Additionally, there have been legal cases regarding the usage of AI:

* [GitHub Copilot litigation](https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/)
* [IEEE article explaining concerns about AI generated code ownership](https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-code-generation-ownership)
* [Tracker of broader lawsuits against AI companies](https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/11/02/tracker-of-tort-lawsuits-v-ai-companies/)

### Stolen Training Data

AI companies use data from across the web to train their models, most often without the website owners' and users' consent. Big tech companies like Google and Meta are scraping data from the users of major FOSS projects, such as Mastodon, WordPress, and other ActivityPub-powered and self-hosted software.

* In 2023, [the Washington Post published a list of sources in Google's C4 data set](https://archive.ph/eehKq). A multitude of fediverse instances and personal sites were included. The fediverse is known for its userbase being major proponents of privacy and opt-in consent, making this especially jarring for those who have chosen to use decentralized social media for control over their data.
* In 2025, [a similar leak of Meta's sources was published](https://archive.ph/NZlf3). Meta's list demonstrates how their integration of ActivityPub into their Threads software has enhanced their ability to scrape content without authorization. Threads is widely blocked in some parts of the fediverse, but their scraping of server CDNs has allowed them to get around that. Notably, both the CDN domains of the managed hosting services masto.host and fedi.monster are included in the list; large servers like mastodon.art, which is hosted by the former and has many artists who've left sites like DeviantArt and others due to their AI scraping of user content, had [media unknowingly scraped](https://mastodon.art/@Curator/115022115346692178).
* In March 2026, [a research paper](https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20957v2) showed that simply fine-tuning LLMs resulted in outputs containing up to 90% of entire (copyrighted) books, contradicting LLM companies' previous statements in court that their models do not store copies of training data. After fine-tuning exclusively on a single author, the researchers were able to cause the LLM to output works from over 30 completely unrelated authors across different genres. None of the models were explicitly trained on these books by the researchers, which indicates that LLMs always carry with them a considerable amount of copyrighted materials from training.

Usage of AI in your project is usage of tooling that blatantly disregards licensing and violates the Code of Conduct in your project (if present), making said tools antithetical to FOSS' purpose.

## What You Can Do

I'd like to kindly suggest implementing a strict "No AI" policy. This can also help with staying your code legally clean as code by AI agents often ignore licensing requirements.

You can find other projects that have taken steps to say no to AI here:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

For a specific policy, I can recommend the following policies for inspiration:

- [wafrn's Contributring Doc](https://codeberg.org/wafrn/wafrn/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)

- [Loupe's Use of Generative AI Policy](https://discourse.gnome.org/t/loupe-no-longer-allows-generative-ai-contributions/27327)

Thank you and kind regards :pray: