# AI guidelines for mentoring programs (like GSoC and Outreachy) 2 messages from 2025-04-15 to 2025-04-22. Participants: Christian Couder, Patrick Steinhardt. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/63295 ## Christian Couder, 2025-04-15 09:21 Subject: AI guidelines for mentoring programs (like GSoC and Outreachy) Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CAP8UFD37_qsTjM97GK2EOWHteqoUKdwxjKS-SU629H2LnbTTtA%40mail.gmail.com ``` Hi everyone, We now have a new "AI guidelines" on https://git.github.io/General-Application-Information/ following some discussions between GSoC 2025 potential mentors and org admins by email and on https://github.com/git/git.github.io/pull/771. We came up relatively quickly with these guidelines because this year 71 out of 79 proposals we received for the GSoC 2025 were spammy and very often AI generated. This is a significant increase compared to previous years. I remember that a few years ago there were less than a dozen spammy proposals. We also received some AI generated spam patches and emails to our personal email addresses. Other organizations participating in the GSoC 2025 also received an increasing amount of such spam, and organizations which documented some guidelines against it said they receive less of it. A large amount of discussion has happened on the GSoC mentors list about this. Let us know if you have an opinion about this, or if you think that the whole Git project should have AI guidelines. Thanks. ``` ## Patrick Steinhardt, 2025-04-22 07:02 Subject: Re: AI guidelines for mentoring programs (like GSoC and Outreachy) Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/aAc_Fp7HFXydrHkq%40pks.im In-Reply-To: ``` Hi Chris, On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 11:21:53AM +0200, Christian Couder wrote: > Hi everyone, > > We now have a new "AI guidelines" on > https://git.github.io/General-Application-Information/ following some > discussions between GSoC 2025 potential mentors and org admins by > email and on https://github.com/git/git.github.io/pull/771. > > We came up relatively quickly with these guidelines because this year > 71 out of 79 proposals we received for the GSoC 2025 were spammy and > very often AI generated. This is a significant increase compared to > previous years. I remember that a few years ago there were less than a > dozen spammy proposals. We also received some AI generated spam > patches and emails to our personal email addresses. > > Other organizations participating in the GSoC 2025 also received an > increasing amount of such spam, and organizations which documented > some guidelines against it said they receive less of it. A large > amount of discussion has happened on the GSoC mentors list about this. Yeah, it's been a bit of a pain this year indeed. Thanks for creating the AI guidelines, let's hope it improves the situation. > Let us know if you have an opinion about this, or if you think that > the whole Git project should have AI guidelines. We (you and I) have discussed this internally and got to the conclusion that it's not needed for the Git project as a whole at the current point in time. We haven't yet seen any obvious issues with AI-generated patches on the mailing list, so it would probably be premature to worry about it now already. We can and should reevaluate though in case we ever see an uptick of slop. I'm of course happy to hear differing opinions. Patrick ```