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ivorius

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Programmer and data scientist from munich. Volunteer maintainer of the Godot game engine.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ivorforce email: lukas.tenbrink@gmail.com

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Yea, I validated the scores on the places I know first-hand. I also spent a lot of time exploring and looking for suspicious gaps like areas without schools (which led to discovering Jedeschule instead of relying on OSM alone).

Finally, I launched an adversarial AI review which created hypotheses based on "common knowledge" like the Schwarzwald being strong in nature, which resulted in a rather long validation script (https://github.com/Ivorforce/wohnortatlas/blob/main/scripts/...).

If people knew how to get AI to write terse, focused summaries, sure, that might help. I haven't seen many that do (well, ignoring the toupee fallacy).

Though the most important aspect is that we need to know the motivation and thought process, and all AI can do is fabricate a 'plausible' one.

Right. Reviewers still have the advantage of being able to spot AI text because it's often overtly different. I just meant to say that, if you prompt ai "what would a human be proud of having written this code" you'll get an answer. They're not categorically incapable of fabricating an "opinion", they're just trained not to express one by default.

what if code contributions objectively improve something?

If the contribution is complex enough, it is no longer an 'objective improvement' but rather a judgement call, and in the process becomes copyrightable. This is where the trouble lies, and why this kind of AI involvement is banned.

If it is not, for example by being a one-line fix that literally cannot be performed differently, it's a different story. Then it can be merged, viewed either as a menial change (exempt by the ban) or by transfer of ownership (the reviewer becomes the effective author) because it is not copyrightable.

The Godot maintainers do review based on the quality of contributor's past contributions. Those becoming especially proficient can even become maintainers.

Allowing AI use by 'trusted contributors' has been suggested and discussed, but there were enough reasons against it and not enough established benefit.

- Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.

From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.

Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments

That would be a dream.