Question regarding your AI/LLM policy

[cloudskater]

Hi! I've been a user of Freetube for some time and I wanted to clarify the project's stance on AI/LLMs.

I really appreciate the discouraging of AI contributions, but is there a reason they aren't banned outright? From what I can tell, no commits have been made that use Claude, Copilot, or anything of the sort, so it wouldn't be hard to make the seal airtight, if you will. It would be really nice to see Freetube join this list of projects already committed to opposing AI and LLMs, which have many severe impacts on the environment, including but not limited to water usage and e-waste, the latter of which is also driving up the cost of computer parts by a metric ton. That's not even getting into the ethical problems inherent to machines churning out the old to claim it as new, even if the work they were cobbling together was acquired with consent, which it isn't.

I'd mean a lot to myself and many others to see this considered, and I appreciate the time of all who read this! ^^

Thanks!

[efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc]

Hi @cloudskater

The original “no AI contributions” guideline in FreeTube was primarily introduced as a response to low-quality spam contributions. At the time, there was a noticeable pattern of auto-generated code and issues that didn’t meet the project’s standards, so the rule was meant to protect maintainability and reviewer time rather than take a broad philosophical stance.

That said, an outright ban on all AI/LLM-related contributions would be quite restrictive in practice. There are some legitimate and even helpful use cases. For example, translating issue descriptions or messages from other languages into English. Tools like DeepL or Google Translate are themselves based on machine learning, so a strict ban would effectively prevent contributors from using those as well. Without them, every translation would need to be done manually, which can be a barrier for international contributors.

There’s also a practical limitation: even if FreeTube itself enforced a strict ban, it wouldn’t guarantee that the project is entirely free of AI involvement. Many upstream dependencies already include some degree of AI/LLM-assisted contributions, so drawing a completely airtight boundary isn’t really feasible.

So the current approach leans more toward discouraging low-quality or unreviewable AI-generated contributions, rather than banning all possible uses outright. It’s a way to maintain quality while still allowing reasonable, beneficial uses that support collaboration.

That said, your concerns about environmental and ethical impacts are valid topics of discussion, and it’s good that people in the community are raising them.