SciActive Human Contribution Policy

Version 1.0 (https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/)

Definitions

“This policy” refers to version 1 of the SciActive Human Contribution Policy.

“The project” means the collective body of work covered by this policy, including but not limited to, the source code, object code, documentation, scripts, configuration files, graphical assets, supporting material, policy documents, translations, and processes.

“AI generated” means that the subject material is in whole or in meaningful part the output of a generative AI model, such as a Large Language Model. This does not include code that is the result of non-generative tools, such as standard compilers, linters, or basic IDE auto-completions. This does, however, include code that is the result of code block generators and automatic refactoring tools that make use of generative AI models.

“Contribution” means any material submitted to the project with the intention of being included in, or distributed with, the project. A contribution may be material that is presented to a review process, such as a pull request, or material that is merged into any of the project’s material tracking or distribution systems, such as a source control commit or submission to a content management system.

“Contributor” means the natural person or legal entity ultimately responsible for submitting the contribution. The contributor, in this case, cannot be an automated agent. In the case that an automated agent submits or attempts to submit a contribution to the project, the natural person or legal entity responsible for initiating the agent is the contributor.

“User” means the person or entity who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use the project or its product.

Policy

Contributions must be human authored. AI generated contributions are not permitted and will not be accepted. This includes, but is not limited to, AI generated source code, object code, documentation, scripts, configuration files, graphical assets, supporting material, policy documents, and translations.
If a contributor attempts to submit AI generated material without disclosing that the material is AI generated, the contribution will be considered a deceptive contribution, and the contributor may be permanently banned from contributing to the project.

Reasoning

Legal Implications of AI Generated Contributions

License Laundering

Generative AI models are trained on publicly available code that may be subject to restrictive licensing conditions. These models may produce verbatim, near verbatim, or derivative snippets of this code, which would therefore be subject to the license terms under which that code was released. If these snippets are introduced into a code base with an incompatible license, that code base’s licensing could become legally unenforceable, or the maintainers of the code base could even be subject to lawsuits.

This policy helps protect the project from having incompatibly licensed code introduced into the project’s code base.

Copyright Ineligibility

As of March 2026, the US Copyright Office and several international bodies maintain that AI generated material, without significant human “creative control”, cannot be copyrighted. This means that AI generated material often resides in the public domain, making it impossible to enforce any license terms on the material.

This policy helps protect the project from having material from the public domain introduced into the project.

Compliance with New Laws

New regulations may impose strict control or new liability for AI generated material. This may include, and may not be limited to, legal liabilities concerning security vulnerabilities or “hallucinated” sections of AI generated code.

This policy helps protect the project from becoming in violation of any new laws, or liable in new ways, with regard to any new legislation that may govern the use or distribution of AI generated material.

Technical and Security Implications of AI Generated Contributions

Prevalence of Security Vulnerabilities

AI generated code may be more likely than human authored code to introduce security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities can be very difficult to recognize during the code review process.

This policy helps protect the project from the introduction of new security vulnerabilities.

Dependency Hallucinations and Slopsquatting

AI generated code often includes references to non-existent dependencies. These references are commonly called “hallucinations”. A new type of attack has arisen that involves an attacker registering a package whose name is frequently hallucinated. When AI generated code containing this hallucination is accepted, and this dependency is installed, the attacker can ship malicious code into the project’s build, introducing a major security vulnerability. This type of attack has become known as “slopsquatting”.

This policy helps protect the project from both hallucinated dependencies and slopsquatting attacks.

Architectural Drift

AI generated material frequently mirrors industry-standard practices and lacks the context of the project’s overall architecture and practices, resulting in code that can duplicate efforts, neglect the project’s own practices, and deviate from the project’s overall planned architecture, and documentation that is inconsistent with the project’s existing standards and practices. As more of a project becomes AI generated material, the original architecture can become more obscured, resulting in a code base that is often no longer coherent and difficult to return back to the original “vision”.

This policy helps protect the project from incurring this kind of technical debt.

Ethical and Community Implications of AI Generated Contributions

Erosion of Trust

The users of the project have an implicit trust that the maintainers of the project understand the code contained within the project’s code base. AI generated code, which may not even be fully understood by the contributor, breaks this implicit trust. AI generated code is the result of an automated process, not intentional authorship. Allowing this code into the project’s code base would mean the maintainers of the project may not fully understand the code base.

This policy helps protect the project from eroding the trust the users have placed into the project and its maintainers.

Maintenance Exhaustion

AI generated material can be created much faster than it can be reviewed. This imbalance can lead to a heavy burden by maintainers of reviewing an abundance of AI generated material that often has the appearance of high quality material, but contains many flaws. The difficulty of properly reviewing these contributions, along with the tremendous volume of these contributions, can lead maintainers to feel “burnt out” and leave the project.

This policy helps protect the project from incurring this heavy maintenance load.

Use of This Policy

This policy is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Anyone can share and reuse this policy, in its original form or modified, under the conditions of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The full legal text of the license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en. If you modify this policy, rename the policy in order to avoid the implication that the modified policy is endorsed by SciActive Inc.

Text Version

You can download the text version of the policy here. You can place this next to your existing CONTRIBUTING.md or README.md, and place the following text in one of those files to apply the policy:

This project adheres to the [SciActive Human Contribution Policy](HUMAN-CONTRIBUTION-POLICY-1.0.md).

Seal of Human Authorship

If your entire project is covered by and adheres to version 1 of the SciActive Human Contribution Policy, without modification and without interruption, you may use the following seal to convey that you only accept human authored contributions.

SciActive Inc grants you permission to use this seal in your project only if the project, in its entirety, is covered by and adheres to the unmodified SciActive Human Contribution Policy version 1, and only during the uninterrupted time your project is initially covered by the policy. If at any time your project becomes no longer covered, you must stop using the seal, permanently. Effectively, this means that if you temporarily remove the policy to accept AI generated contributions, then reimplement the policy, you no longer have permission from SciActive Inc to use the seal, and you must remove it from your project.