Open Slopware

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives.

The intention of this list is to raise awareness of AI/LLM usage in popular open-source software. Provided below is an informed set of AI-free alternatives for users and developers to consider should their ethical boundaries be crossed or tolerance for risk be exceeded. This list is not a resource to be used for the harassment of other open-source developers. If you wish to advocate for the cessation of use and/or removal of AI-generated code from another project, we ask that it be done respectfully and constructively.

For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.

To Contribute, checkout our CONTRIBUTING.md.

Note

This is a fork of a repo by the same name maintained by the @gen-ai-transparency org on Codeberg. If they make their repo available again, we will contribute back.

• Definitions
  • Vibecoded
  • AI Functionality
  • Permissive AI Policy
  • AI Code Reviews
  • Gen AI 'Art'
  • AI Sponsored
  • Request for Help
• Sibling Repos
• Tainted Software
  • Browsers
    • Desktop Browsers
      • Alternatives
    • Mobile Browsers
      • Alternatives
  • Search Engines
  • Command-Line Shells
  • Computer Graphics
    • Image Manipulation
    • Photography
    • Video
  • Terminal Emulators
  • Developer Tools
  • Programming Languages
  • Editors
  • Accessibility Tools
  • Microcontroller Tools and Libraries
  • Service Monitoring
  • Programming Language-Specific Tooling
    • C
    • CSS
    • JavaScript / TypeScript
    • Python
    • Rust
  • Game Engines
  • Audio
  • Package Managers
  • Password Management
  • Services and Utilities
    • File Storage
    • Game Managers
      • alternatives
    • Social Media
      • Servers
        • Alternatives
      • Clients
    • Messaging
    • Budgeting
    • Virtualization
    • VPN Software
  • System Services and Daemons
  • Bootloaders
  • Operating Systems
    • Alternatives
• Why not LLMs?
  • Legal Ramifications
  • Stolen Training Data
  • Environmental Impact
  • Labor
  • Poor Code Quality
    • Deskilling
    • Infosec risks
  • Healthy and Safety
    • Maintainer Fatigue
    • Ties to the War Industrial Complex
    • Effects on Policing
  • Effect on Hardware Prices
• License

Definitions

Term	Definition
LLM	Large Language Model, a language model trained on vast amounts of text (often entire websites without the website owner's permission)
slop	Anything generated by AI, typically code, books, articles, or images.
slopshop	Company, Organization, or Group of sloperators working together to use AI to generate content.

Below are special definitions that are used for tagging purposes.

Vibecoded

Asking an AI to write software for you (often without human review). Per Wikipedia:

In computer programming, vibe coding is a software development practice assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) such as by chatbots (programs that simulate conversation) or AI agents such as Codex or Claude Code. The software developer describes a project or task in a prompt to a large language model (LLM), which generates source code automatically. Vibe coding may involve accepting AI-generated code without reviewing the output thoroughly, instead relying on results and follow-up prompts to guide changes.

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI) in February 2025.

A Vibecoder is a person who uses AI prompts to generate anything, typically code or images. It would therefore be appropriate to call Andrej Karpathy a vibecoder.

Evidence can be:

• core maintainers' blog or social media post about vibecoding
• link to readme, website, or documentation stating the project is vibecoded
• link to AI policy, developer docs, or CONTRIBUTING doc that requires LLM usage

AI Functionality

This would include the ability to enable or disable an AI feature, such as an AI assistant or AI summary feature. This would also cover the case when a project depends on an AI program or library, such as an LLM SDK.

Evidence can be:

• a link to the docs explaining the AI Functionality
• a blog post advertising the AI Functionality
• a link to the default branch in a repo that shows where the AI Functionality is implemented

Permissive AI Policy

A policy that permits the use of AI/LLMs in any capacity.

Evidence can be:

• an explicit AI policy (e.g. AI_POLICY.md) in the repo or something in the project's contributing guidelines or in their website's documentation.
• an LLM friendly AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or other such LLM instruction files or folders.

AI Code Reviews

An AI agent/bot is used to review pull requests, which makes slop acceptance more probable and maintainability more difficult, especially when human reviews are scarce.

Evidence can be:

• a link to an AI code review requested by a maintainer.
• an AI code review CI workflow.
• a PR where an AI code review seems to be automatically created by some sort of third party app

Gen AI 'Art'

AI "Art" is being used in a project. This is typically for banners, avatars, promotional material, and/or blog posts. This means they're using tools that steal art from visual artists.

Evidence can be:

• link to the place where the AI art is used

AI Sponsored

The project is sponsored directly by an AI company.

Evidence can be:

• Blog post disclosing AI funding
• link to website that lists AI companies in sponsors list
• README that says "Sponsored by "

Request for Help

This means someone is asking for help with research. They would like it if you found the last known good version of a project or suggestions on alternatives for people to use. You can submit a pull request to add this info.

Sibling Repos

This is a section for repos that are similar to this one either because they are also forks of the original upstream, or because they align with our goal of identifying and avoiding AI/LLM usage OR identifying/elevating projects that do NOT use AI/LLMs. These repos are not all maintained by the same people, but we may share some contributors and generally be kind FOSS neighbors.

• llm-afflicted-software offers a similar list to ours here, however in YMAL file format for each category, making it more suitable to consumption via code (for instance writing a CLI, GUI, or TUI tool to consume it). They've also kindly reached out in the past and submitted Issues and PRs (e.g. #12, #22) to help us here.
• forge.starlightnet.work/Team/No-AI/ which is the repo for this no-AI list that lists projects that have explicitly pledged not to use AI or have an explicit policy to not use AI.
• slop-free-index is a list of software that has taken steps to reject AI in its development processes.

Tainted Software

Warning

We've recently added a "Last Untainted Version or Commit ID" section to our below tables. This is meant for tech savvy individuals to be able to fork the project and continue maintaining it without the use of AI. Choosing to install an older version of software could expose you to to security risks over time. Only do this if you are able to accept such risks.

Browsers

Desktop Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Chromium/Blink engine		(1, 2, 3)
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)
Ladybird		(1)
WebKit		(1, 2, 3)
Zen		(1, 2) (1)

Note

Desktop Browser Alternatives

• Epiphany (by GNOME, WebKit based) does not currently have a stance, but GNOME developers as a whole show aware anti-"AI" sentiments and roll out wide reaching rules against it.
• Servo (New engine, formerly owned by Mozilla, now by a co-op) is not yet daily driver ready, but has strong protections for when it is some time in the future.

Mobile Browsers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
Firefox		(1, 2) (1)

Note

Mobile Browser Alternatives

• IronFox For Android, while not officially related to LibreWolf, some of the same developers work on it.

Search Engines

Name	Alternatives	Evidence	Notes
Searxng	LibreY	Copilot used in reviews	Note: maintainers experimenting with and open to adding AI results, see 1, 2, 3

Command-Line Shells

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
nushell	elvish shell	Integrated MCP server, core developer sets Claude as a co-author
yash	dash shell, but there are no other major shells fully targeting POSIX	Assigns and auto-reviews MRs with LLMs

Computer Graphics

Image Manipulation

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
ImageMagick		(1)
excalidraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
tldraw		(1)	LibreOffice Draw
draw.io		(1)	LibreOffice Draw

Photography

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
RapidRAW		From the README: "with the support from Google Gemini." Roadmap includes adding GenAI.
RawTherapee	Stick to version 5.12	Use Copilot for review PR7518, PR 7435, PR 7378 and code changes commit c4b0400

Video

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
VLC		(1)	Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based)
gstreamer		(1)
mpv		(1)	MPlayer Showtime (gstreamer-based) SMPlayer (mplayer-based)
Kodi		(1) (1)
Jellyfin (server)		(1) (1)
Jellyfin Desktop	Use the (now archived) Qt-based client	(1) (1, 2)
PipePipe		(1)	LibreTube
NewPipe		(1)	LibreTube

Terminal Emulators

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
iTerm2		(1)
Ghostty		(1)
Kitty		(1, 2, 3)

Note

Alternative terminal emulators

• Alacritty or the Alacritty fork with sixel
• Contour Terminal
• COSMIC terminal
• Deepin Terminal
• foot
• GNOME Terminal
• Konsole
• MATE Terminal
• Rio Terminal
• xfce4-terminal
• XTerm

Developer Tools

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
atuin	Built-in shell history	AI command generation, LLM PRs accepted
Sapling	Continue using git itself	.codex and .llms directories, .claude folder
cargo-nextest	Just use cargo test	CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in repository
Golly		5.0 release notes say the app icon is generated by Claude.
Jujutsu	Continue using git itself	A core dev occasionally uses Claude to generate local test cases.; Merged Claude commits (e.g. 1, 2, 3)
just	A Make implementation	Lists an MCP server in its User Manual.
mold linker	GNU ld, LLVM lld	Copilot use
oh-my-posh		AGENTS.md file in main repository
oh-my-bash		All PRs are reviewed with "Qodo" Example PR
ohmyzsh		Added Claude and Grok as search engines; explicitly allows LLMs; contains commits from Claude and Copilot
Starship		Contains commit from Claude
Taskfile	A Make implementation	Uses Copilot for PRs
wild linker	GNU ld, LLVM ld	Allows AI use, doesn't require disclosure, accepts AI code
curl	An older version; wget?	Core maintainer uses LLMs for code review (e.g. 1, 2, 3), and is quoted in the description of the Aisle Research Bot LLM. See also this post
rsync	An older version: 3.4.1 and below; Maybe scp or FTP client? (not applicable to the all cases)	For now (2026-03-15) two top commits at 2026-03-01 were "coauthored" by Claude LLM, see: 1 and 2
npmx	npmjs	Include copilot-instructions.md; permissive AI policy; makes use of CoderabbitAI; merges PRs with Claude commits

Note

On task runners and make(1) implementations:

A lot of Make implementations exist that are very fit to replace other task runners. In fact so many were produced, that one can just look up "GNU Make alternative" and find >10 results to pick the one they like the best. Also see: wikipedia/Make Here are some Make implementation suggestions:

name	description
GNU Make	the most complete one, extra extensions, guile scripting, exports, etc.
NetBSD make	Make used to build NetBSD ports tree
Jam	OSS rewrite by Perforce

Programming Languages

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
.NET	See below	.NET Runtime PRs, .NET SDK PRs
Julia	An older version of Python (w/ appropriate scientific libraries)	AGENTS.md in main repository, PRs "written by Claude"
Kotlin	Java, Clojure	JetBrains is openly embracing AI; the repo is fully slop-equipped and contains commits from Claude
Python	Older version of Python; Lua	Some Gen AI allowed as per Developer Guide and Contains code from Claude
Ruby		Maintainer contributed code from Claude. Additional examples: 1, 2, 3	mruby (spin-off) vibe coded by language founder; TruffleRuby (alternative implementation) contains code from Claude, contributed by lead maintainer
Scala	See below	Both v2 and v3 are outfitted for slop; v3 explicitly allows LLM contributions
Typescript	Normal JavaScript; Lua	Contains Copilot instructions and multiple commits from Copilot (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4)

Note

On alternative languages:

Suggestions for alternative programming languages are necessarily more complex than many other categories considered here, as that's one of the core technical choices to be made when starting a new software development project.

Depending on your needs and technical concerns, you may find any number of different alternative languages useful. For example, when considering alternatives to .NET, Java may be an interesting candidate from the perspective of being a similar VM-based framework.

Editors

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
Zed	Lapce, Gram (removes AI integration, codebase may still contain AI code), other popular editors like emacs, etc	They prominently advertise genAI features as a core part of their product. See their website.	There's a killswitch to disable genAI features entirely, but it's likely the code itself is still heavily LLM-authored.
VS Code	VS Codium* removes the AI features from VS Code	It's literally their main advertising tagline, and they publicly use LLMs in their public repository. Most AI "features" are enabled by default, and some cannot be disabled.	*VS Codium is still written with LLMs since Microsoft owns it
VIm	See below	Thread on Hachyderm.io where screenshots show that the lead maintainer, chrisbra, uses Claude for VIm including commits featuring Claude in the VIm repo and other potential LLM code from a contributor as early as March 2024.	This also affects neovim and many other forks.
Neovim	See below	AGENTS.md file, AI policy conditionally allowing slop, refusal to consider a ban and filtering out slop from Vim	See also the entry for Vim; Neovim sources patches from Vim, which also contains slop not repeated here.
Logseq	See below	AGENTS.md file
Joplin	See below	CLAUDE.md file

Note

Note software alternatives

• Zettlr. It is Markdown-based.

Note

Alternative TUI code editors

• emacs
• EVi
• vim-classic
• Other forks of VIm prior to March 20th 2024, build v9.1.0190 or commit 8950bf7f8b85c1287d4e696965d88091fcc60594

Accessibility Tools

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
espeak-ng	flite	Dev uses copilot for review and is setting up copilot instructions	espeak still exists, but is heavily outdated and very bad from a modern standpoint, so it cannot be considered as an alternative. flite users may also wish to install speech-dispatcher-flite.
Nametag	Monica	Many Claude commits (e.g. 1 2 3)	Last Monica version is from 2024, exercise caution.

Microcontroller Tools and Libraries

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
FastLED		.claude and .cursor folders in main repository

Service Monitoring

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Uptime Kuma	Gatus	Dev uses copilot for review
Glitchtip		AI policy states Glitchtip is written with plenty of AI assistance

Programming Language-Specific Tooling

C

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
harfbuzz	Not realistically replaceable currently, use earlier version.	Core developer enthusiastically discloses LLM usage
sd-bus (via systemd)	basu (sd-bus extracted from systemd 2 years before first AI commits)	See systemd section

CSS

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
tailwindcss	twind	Sponsorship page states explicitly that the founder uses AI to write code and even sells access to his "Cursor/Claude/AGENTS.md rules"

JavaScript And TypeScript

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
Zod	TypeBox (in grey area)	CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursorrules in GitHub repo	Is also sponsored by AI startups
Valibot	TypeBox (in grey area)	Uses LLM's in GitHub issues and PR's; prompts folder; LLMs.txt
ArkType	TypeBox (in grey area)	Uses an LLM for PR review (e.g. PR #1594), accepted a PR from someone using Claude, and has an llms.txt	Contains a Cursor instruction file that may be pro-LLM
Electron	Using native GUIs, such as GTK, instead of making a web site	Contains CLAUDE.md and commits from Claude (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Python

Note that Python is itself tainted; see the Programming Languages section.

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Chardet	6.0.0.post1	(1, 2)
JupyterLab	v4.5.6	(1) (1)	Possibly Emacs (1, 2)
Requests		(1)	urllib.request in Python Standard Library
Textual	v7.5.0	(1) (1)	pytermgui

Rust

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
c2rust		Statement from developer postprocess component uses LLMs PR made with AI
egui	imgui, relm, iced	Claude commit
facet	Use more specific deserialization libraries and avoid macros that slow things down anyway. serde itself is tainted by its Palantir-defending author. nanoserde could be suitable for certain use cases.	Core developer openly uses LLMs for library dev
ratatui	iocraft (<=0.7.17) and cursive. console and its family of libraries may also be enough for some use cases.	Core developer has stated their use of AI for rust code
iocraft	An older version (<=0.7.17, prior to Feb 12, 2026); cursive and console	Contains commits from Claude
rust-analyzer	cargo check	Allows AI contributions and has Claude rules
wgpu	vulcano, ash, glow	Explicitly allowed in CONTRIBUTING.md, LLM instructions added according to a decision by the maintainers in this issue
zbus		CLAUDE.md, core developer talking about their AI policy (screenshot)

Also, there is an advisory database of Rust slopware crates, which you can use in tools like cargo-deny: https://codeberg.org/1millibyte/rust-slopdb.

Game Engines

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
UPBGE 0.5	UPBGE 0.36.1 seems to be slop-free	0.5 release notes state the use of AI in plain language
Godot Engine	Pandemonium Engine	Allows LLM contributions (also see this comment)

Audio

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
HISE	DPF	Include AGENTS.md
zrythm	Ardour (opinions may vary whether it is a replacement or not)	CLAUDE.md in repository
FineTune	BackgroundMusic	Include CLAUDE.md in the .gitignore

Package Managers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
brew		(1)	Build packages from source
macports		(1)	Build packages from source
PiKISS		(1)	Use system repositories provided by your distro or manual installation of software

Password Management

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence
AliasVault		(1)
Bitwarden		(1)
KeepassXC		(1, 2, 3)

Note

Password manager alternatives

• vaultwarden (server) / rbw (client)
• KeePass 2. It is a .NET application, but Mono or Wine can be used for non-Windows platforms.
• KeePassXC 2.7.9 was released before the statement, and was awarded 3 year security Visa by the French National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) for a First-level Security Certification (CSPN), valid in France and Germany, under report No. ANSSI-CSPN-2025/16 (archive.org, certificate).
• Secrets uses the KeePass file format.
• Password managers based on pass or Himitsu could be interesting.

Services and Utilities

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Calibre 8.16.2	BookLore Clbre, a Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, a Calibre hard-fork from before AI features	Added "Discuss selected book(s) with AI" feature
Ghost	WriteFreely	Include configurations for Claude and cursor; images on website seem generated
Wagtail CMS	WriteFreely	Include AGENTS.md; Wagtail AI
WordPress	WriteFreely	Include AGENTS.md; has Copilot PRs
Gitea	Forgejo (self-hosted) or Codeberg (hosted)	Include AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md; Include AI contribution policy; Some blog post images are AI generated
GitLab	Forgejo (self-hosted) or Codeberg (hosted)	Include AGENTS.md and .ai;
somafm_tui	soma-player	Commits from QwenCoder & Claude
Bludit CMS	See below	Coding with Claude and reviewing by Code Rabbit
Hugo	See below	Include AGENTS.md, Claude.md, Commits made with Claude
Pelican	See below	Includes Claude-generated code
Zola	See below	Include .claude

Note

Static site generators alternatives

• Bridgetown
• BSSG
• Jekyll maybe? No signs of AI in the repo but also no clear statement provided
• Haunt
• Zine

File Storage

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
MinIO	Garage	Advertises AI as their primary focus on their website.
Nextcloud	seafile for file storage and syncing only (not a complete worksuite replacement)	✨ Nextcloud Assistant (can be disabled) Nextcloud Desktop has AGENTS.md
SeaweedFS	Garage for S3 api + JuiceFS for the NFS mounts and K8s CSI driver Rook/Ceph	Using Gemini and coderabbitai in PRs.

Game Managers

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Lutris	Bottles	Issue "is lutris slop now" & Discussion "is lutris slop now"

Social Media

This is for both social media websites and apps.

Servers

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Bluesky		(1)	See below
rsky		(1, 2, 3)	See below
PeerTube		(1) (1)
Mastodon		(1)	See below
Misskey		(1)	See below
Lemmy		(1)

Note

Generic social media server alternatives

• GoToSocial
• Wafrn supports both ActivityPub and ATproto
• snac2
• Iceshrimp.NET
• Epicyon

Clients

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
IceCubesApp for iOS		(1)	Feditext (an iOS fediverse app in beta), wafrn-rn
Bluesky Social App		(1) (1, 2, 3)	wafrn-rn

Messaging

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
Mattermost	Delta Chat, matrix	Distributes an "agents" plugin, with several LLM features, core developers commit LLM-generated code
Telegram	Delta Chat, matrix	.cursor folder in repository
Zulip	Delta Chat, matrix	Integrated an LLM "topic summary" feature
Sharkord	Delta Chat, matrix	GitHub Copilot is mentioned in the .gitignore, maintainer mentions using AI

Unified Push Distributors

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
ntfy-sh	see below	v2.18.0 is "14,997 added lines of code [...] written by Cursor and Claude" (archive)

list of unified push distributors at: https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors:

• Sunup
• NextPush (see entry for NextCloud on taintedness)
• Conversations (XMPP client) or one of the forks

Budgeting

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Actual		Include AGENTS.md; Used Open Collective funds for Cursor subscription
Firefly III		Include agents.md

Virtualization

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Botspot Virtual Machine		1	QEMU + virt-manager

VPN Software

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Headscale	nebula	AGENTS.md and .claude/agents added to repo, commits/PRs include "assisted by claude" notes (example, there are plenty more)
netbird	nebula	Privacy policy lists OpenAI in List of third party providers

System Services and Daemons

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
framework-system	BIOS settings, UI widgets, /proc	CLAUDE file, Claude usage by maintainer
lvm2		Many commits authored by Claude and Cursor. Examples: 1 2 3
rsyslog	syslog-ng	Explicitly stated in the documentation
systemd	dinit, s6, OpenRC, shepherd	AGENTS.md, Claude used for commits
wireplumber		AGENTS.md file in code repository
Mesa3D		Explicitly stated in their Contribution Guidelines.

Bootloaders

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Limine	Hyper, GRUB	This entry was added by the creator and main maintainer of Limine. Limine does not ban code authored by LLMs or anyone/anything else, as long as it's reviewed by a human. The author has used LLMs (Claude Code) numerous times for many commits.

Operating Systems

Name	Last Untainted Version or Commit ID	Tags and Evidence	Alternative(s)
Linux Kernel		(1) (1)	See below
FreeBSD		(1, 2) (1)	See below
TrueNAS		(1)
ReactOS	d4993c6	(1) (1, 2, 3)	Wine for some use cases
FreeDOS		(1) (1, 2)	The original MS-DOS source code is under the Expat/MIT license
OpenBSD		(1, 2)	See below
DragonFlyBSD		(1)	See below
MidnightBSD	ed4b0a5	(1) (1) (1, 2, 3)	See below

Note

Alternative operating systems

Operating systems are a tough ask. No matter what you choose, support will be inferior compared to an operating system with the Linux kernel, so don't feel pressured to switch.

• MirBSD has banned LLMs
• NetBSD has a somewhat ambiguous policy
• RedoxOS has banned LLMs
• Haiku has banned LLMs

Why not LLMs?

Could use some help writing this with concrete receipts on environmental, social, political, and economic/labor harms.

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 sloperator 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.

Legal Cases And Law Problems

• copilot litigations, IEEE article explaining how we go here
• broader lawsuits against AI companies tracker

License Problems

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

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

• chardet - switched from LGPL to MIT license without asking all contributors (which itself is a violation of 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

Stolen Training Data

AI companies use data from across the web for training 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. 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. Meta's list demonstrates how their integration of ActivityPub into their Threads software has enhanced their ability to mine 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.

FOSS projects listed in this repo are using tooling that blatantly disregard licensing and violate of Codes of Conduct, making said tools antithetical to FOSS' purpose.

Environmental Impact

To start learning a bit more, you can checkout the wikipedia page on Environmental impact of artificial intelligence. We're very open to people contributing other explanations, links, and resources to learn more about this. Here's what we've gathered so far:

• MIT News: Generative AI’s environmental impact
• MIT Technology Review: We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

Labor

AI usage and normalization contributes to labor violations in many ways that are obvious and some you may not be aware of.

On one hand, many things that you think are "AI" are actually humans in another country pretending to be an AI chatbot for you for either extremely low wages or in some cases, no wages e.g. prison labor. This is particularly common for "friend"/"sex" bots, but it is also extremely common in the image/video identification. You can find a bit more info at the following links:

• Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AI’s development
• OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic
• 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back
• These Prisoners Are Training AI: In high-wage Finland, where clickworkers are rare, one company has discovered a novel labor force—prisoners.
• Amazon grocery stores previously reported to use AI actually used people in India

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
• Claude Tested Everything Except the One Thing That Mattered (Ai agent refuses to follow explicit instructions to test createPost() in increasingly erratic ways)
• Amazon calls engineers for a “deep dive” internal meeting to discuss “GenAI”-related outages
• GitClear has released reports in 2024 and 2025 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 compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
• Developers who use early-2025 LLMs 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, learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
• A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
• There are anecdotal reports of LLM users forgetting how to code.

Infosec risks

This also often results in massive security holes.

• Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails
• Moltbook’s ‘vibe-coded’ breach is the future of security failures
• In a study evaluating over 500k code samples, LLM-generated code was found to contain more high-risk security vulnerabilities than human-generated code
• LLMs make up package names, making them vulnerable to incorporating malicious code in "slopsquatting" attacks (Arxiv study)

Healthy and Safety

There's been a number of high profile incidents that have resulted in endangerment or death. Here's some examples:

• AI Toy Exposed 50,000 Logs of Its Chats With Kids to Anyone With a Gmail Account

• Content Warning: Suicide

  • Wikipedia: Deaths linked to chatbots
  • AI chatbot pushed a teen to kill himself, a lawsuit against its creator alleges

LLM use has also been linked to new-onset psychosis.

Ties to the War Industrial Complex

A lot of AI companies also work directly with nation states for use in their Departments of War (sometimes called Defense) 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.

As another example NPR: OpenAI announced Pentagon deal after Trump banned Anthropic which was due to the USA Department of War launching an AI acceleration strategy.

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 intensionally or not. Examples:

Content Warning: War details, death

• Gaza: UN experts deplore use of purported AI to commit ‘domicide’ in Gaza, call for reparative approach to rebuilding
• Lavender & Where’s Daddy: How Israel Used AI to Form Kill Lists & Bomb Palestinians in Their Homes
• Microsoft says it provided AI to Israeli military for war
• Google has dropped its promise not to use AI for weapons

All of this to remind you that if you use AI, you're helping to support these companies and the additional activities they participate in, outside of generative code or images.

Effects on Policing

Police have quickly embraced AI, which has already directly led to people being jailed for things they've never done. As examples:

• This Grandmother was jailed for 6 months after an AI error linked her to a crime in a state she had never even visited
• How Wrongful Arrests Based on AI Derailed 3 Men's Lives

This is, in part, due to companies such as Amazon Aggressively pushing police to use AI which they do through both facial recognition and offering compute for predictive policing. With regards to facial recognition, here's an example of how it too can lead to false arrests: Face Recognition on Flawed Data.

There have been warnings about AI in policing, particularly around racial bias, such as:

• Bennan Center of Justice: The Dangers of Unregulated AI in Policing
• OxJournal: Predictive Policing or Predictive Prejudice? A Study of the Legal, Historical and Ethical Implications of AI in Policing
• The Guardian: Police AI Chief admits crime fighting tech will have bias...
• A third of all Black children were flagged by a child services agency

Maintainer Fatigue

Having to deal with the onslaught of many LLM written pull requests and issues, causes real maintainer burnout that stagnates projects as maintainers become overwhelmed with half baked, poorly written, insecure code. Here's some examples:

• Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure “intact mental health”
• Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions
• An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (matplotlib)

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 upward 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 down-stream effects for consumers is that near 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

• 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

License

This repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license. Please see LICENSE.txt for more information.