My thoughts on disclosing AI usage in Open Source
Recently on lobste.rs someone posted the article If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions? which led to a lot of heated discussion about AI disclosure.
A lot of people in the comments are pretty adamant that if you use AI in any capacity to contribute to an Open Source project you should be morally obliged to inform the maintainers of its usage.
While agree with the general premise, I think this is a really slippery slope.
If I've 'written' the code and had Github Copilot autocomplete something for me, should I disclose my usage of AI?
If I use 'Cursor Tab' to help me quickly restructure some code, should I have to disclose my usage of AI?
My gut feel says that's kind of a ridiculous expectation.
In my eyes I'm still authoring the code.
I'm using these 'AI models' the same way I'd use traditional autocomplete, vim motions or refactoring tools. They simply assist me manipulate code to get the end desired result.