AI Policy

Important

We forbid the use of generative AI tools in postmarketOS.

The following is not allowed in postmarketOS:

• Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to postmarketOS.

• Recommending generative AI tools to other community members for solving problems in the postmarketOS space.

If somebody keeps on violating these rules, we may escalate the situation according to the Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines with warnings and temporary/permanent bans.

Reasoning

AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy[1] and water[2] to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions[3], usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material[4] and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process[5] (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody[6]). Furthermore they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs[7]. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly.

Additionally authors making use of generative AI tools oftentimes increase the maintainer burden and cause further problems by not ensuring the following:

• Understanding completely how the code in their contribution works.

• Describing the change accurately in the commit message.

• Testing the contribution and ensuring it works as described.

• Making sure their patches are unlikely to introduce bugs, especially security bugs.

• Not violating copyright (such as software licenses, creative commons or any other).

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[1]

“After pledging to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, Microsoft’s climate pollution has grown by 30 percent as the company prioritizes AI.” — The Verge, 2024-05-15

[2]

“Over the past 12 years, 16 data centers have been approved in Santiago’s metropolitan area. Most use millions of liters of water annually to keep computers from overheating. Chile is in the midst of a drought, expected to last until 2040.” — Rest of World, 2024-05-31

[3]

“OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic” — TIME, 2023-01-18

[4]

“Amid the rise of generative AI, creators, artists and media rights holders have been forced to reckon with the unlicensed use of their copyrighted material to train AI models without consent or compensation.” — Variety, 2025-03-03

[5]

“When one of these botnets goes nuts, the result is indistinguishable from a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack — it is a distributed denial-of-service attack. Should anybody be in doubt about the moral integrity of the people running these systems, a look at the techniques they use should make the situation abundantly clear.” — LWN.net, 2025-02-14

[6]

Including our infrastructure. As of writing (2025-09), Anubis is being used by the postmarketOS gitlab instance and wiki as well as many other sites and Alpine’s gitlab is protected by go-away to fight off scrapers. Many other websites have adopted similar restrictions.

[7]

“Since the rise of generative AI, many have feared the toll it would take on the livelihood of human workers. Now CEOs are admitting AI’s impact and layoffs are starting to ramp up.” — Forbes, 2025-07-17