In 2020, my friend anarcat published the CLA Denial-Of-Service attack, an interesting musing on the
possibility of weaponising CLA, boiling down to:
find a critical bug
figure out a [non-trivial] patch for the bug
publish the patch in their issue tracker
forever refuse to sign the CLA
The obvious solution to this conundrum is to perform clean-room
reimplementation: have a
person read the patch and produce a specification, then have a second distinct
person read the specification and produce a patch. It's not a silver bullet, as
the less trivial the change, the lengthier the specification, and thus the
lengthier and complexer the implementation. And because of course, complexity
doesn't scale linearly, large changes are horribly annoying to
reimplement.
On the bright side, there is a symmetry in the efforts: an attacker has to
spend time to create a non-trivial change that warrants the effort of being
clean-room'ed. The ubiquitousness of LLM didn't change this balance, it only
lowered the costs for both sides: telling the AI God du jour to write code is
cheap, and so are clean room reimplementations. While
pure-AI outputs can't be copyrighted, having an actual person shepherding it
and sprinkling some authentic human changes and touches it cheap and should be
enough to stamp a copyright on top of it.
But not everyone is comfortable with code produced by AI/LLM, with
some
projects banning
code that isn't 100% human-created. This introduces an
imbalance, as having someone volunteer to read the changes and produce a spec
that could then be used by a different person to implement the fix is orders of
magnitude more costly for the project than for an attacker to generate slop,
likely wing to Brandolini's law
Slop can, of course, be ignored, and small desirable improvements are trivial
to reimplement, so besides identifying slop, it's not a big issue anyway. An
easy way to spice things up would be to find a security issue with a
non-trivial but-still-straightforward fix, send a pull-request with
Co-authored-by: Claudepilchat, and argue that the clean-room reimplementation
is erringly similar to LLM one, which would be a license violation, gasp!
Another more impactful possibility would be to use a time bomb, by sending a
proper legit-looking invasive change. It could be reviewed, merged and shipped,
only for the author to reveal, 3 months later, that the change was actually
done by an LLM, oops-sorry-I-forgot. Would the project spend time in doing a
tedious reversing of all the changes? If so, what if the change was addressing
a complex security issues? If the change isn't reversed, does it mean that the
"no LLM" policy is selectively applied?
Now, I'm not a fan of the "incinerating the planet and feeding unfathomably
high amounts of human-needed resources to train glorified text-prediction
engines so that we can all drown in slop and witness every artistic endeavour
be sucked dry and regurgitated in the form of soulless copy-pasta
every-fucking-where" plan, and I think it would be real nice to stop
implementing it right now. But, on the other hand, I don't think that a
self-righteousness attitude is the appropriate position to adopt: people are
going to send slop to your project, people are going to cheat, it will
happen. Having a pragmatic position on this mess, like "we ask you not to use
LLM in any way, shape or form, don't be a dick" paired with a trusty
trigger-happy ban-hammer conveys the same message while avoiding painting your
project into a corner.
| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Carrot disclosure: Forgejo | 0 | 9.35 | 28-04-2026 |
| 2 | Рекомендации по использованию AI при разработке открытого кода | 0 | 7 | 24-06-2026 |
| 3 | GitHub & other LLM-gen-AI Companies Urge <em>You</em> to Misdirect California Legislature on FOSS Licensing! | 0 | 10.4 | 03-07-2026 |
| 4 | Проект GCC отказался принимать значимые фрагменты кода, созданные нейросетями | 0 | 9.9 | 29-07-2026 |
| 5 | Trivial anti-crawler with Caddy | 0 | 8.42 | 23-06-2026 |
| 6 | The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us | -3 | 6 | 09-07-2026 |
| 7 | Debian Considering General Resolution Over LLM Usage In The Project | 0 | 5.5 | 24-07-2026 |
| 8 | Daily Hacker News for 2026-07-19 | 0 | 10.28 | 20-07-2026 |
| 9 | Spy agencies say AI can help combat AI cyber risks. But don’t forget the basics | 0 | 6 | 24-06-2026 |
| 10 | Follow-up to Carrot disclosure: Forgejo | 0 | 7.3 | 30-04-2026 |