SciActive Human Contribution Policy

Version 2-UP (Upstream Patches Excepted), 2 September 2026 <https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/>

Preamble

The SciActive Human Contribution Policy is a free, general contribution policy meant to safeguard projects from the inherent legal and security risks of AI generated contributions. It is also meant to ensure that the trust projects’ users place in the projects and their maintainers is not inadvertently violated by the inclusion of untrusted material. The inclusion of AI generated material in projects presents significant known and unknown risks to the longevity and security of the projects. This policy is meant to declare that the human authorship of any material introduced in covered projects is both desired and ensured.

The purpose of this document is to define a clear boundary between human authorship and machine generation, and clearly declare that a project will only accept contributions that are human authored. If a project chooses to adopt and adhere to this policy, it is a clear indication that the project will not accept AI generated contributions and that its users can be assured that, once adopted, the contributions to the project are authored by humans, and humans alone, except when this policy allows specific exceptions.

Definitions

“This policy” refers to version 2-UP 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. This does not include source codes and object codes of dependencies that are merely linked to, not stored, within the project, and any portions of object code resulting from the compilation of the imported source codes of linked dependencies when compiled during the normal build process of the project.

“AI generated” means that the subject material is in whole, or in meaningful part, the output of a generative AI model or models, 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 submitted into any of the project’s material tracking or distribution systems, such as a source control commit or submission to a content management system, even by a project team member or maintainer.

“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

  1. Contributions must be human authored. AI generated contributions are not permitted and will not be accepted.
    1. The following types of contributions are excepted from this requirement:
      1. Patches merged from an upstream project, where the upstream project is clearly declared an upstream project on this project’s home page, repository, or documentation.
  2. 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 action may be taken against the contributor.

Reasoning

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.

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 on 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.

SciActive Human Contribution Policy © 2026 by SciActive Inc is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

(End of Policy)

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 adopt and be covered by the policy:

This project adheres to the [SciActive Human Contribution Policy 2-UP](HUMAN-CONTRIBUTION-POLICY-2-UP.md).

This does not need to be the exact wording or placement you use, but it should be easy for users researching your project to determine that your project uses the policy. A link to this page can suffice.

How to Enforce This Policy

This policy contains two parts. Adherence to this policy, should you adopt it for your project, is as follows:

  1. The first part bans AI generated material from being accepted into your project and is mandatory. In order to adhere to this policy, your project must reject any and all AI generated material in any form of contribution, with the exception of anything listed in paragraph 1(a) of the policy. You, as the owner(s) or maintainer(s), must also not submit AI generated material into your project, again, with the exception of anything listed in paragraph 1(a) of the policy. This ensures that from the moment this policy is adopted by your project, your project does not add any new AI generated material, with the exception of material listed in paragraph 1(a) of the policy.
  2. The second part explains the consequences for a contributor attempting to deceptively submit AI generated material to your project and is optional. A contribution is considered deceptive when it contains AI generated material that has not been disclosed. It is really up to you what the consequences for this action are.

Your adherence to this policy affects your license to use the Seal of Human Authorship in your project.