The Godot Foundation has announced a series of upcoming contribution policy updates regarding the use of generative AI (genAI) on the free, open-source engine Godot, banning almost all use cases for code contributions, also known as pull requests (PR).

In a blog post published yesterday, the Godot Foundation recognizes a recent increase in AI-generated contributions, both by AI agents and by humans submitting AI-generated code. "AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing," the post reads, referring to the maintainers who are fielding the PRs.

Godot's policy updates come amidst studios continuing to toot the genAI horn, despite the fact that it has garnered a largely negative reception from developers in recent years, with many arguing that it is having a corrosive effect on the industry.

As for the engine, the foundation's focus will be on ensuring all contributions "are made by humans who can take responsibility for their code," and be able and willing to fix it when needed.

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"AI cannot take responsibility, and we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it," the foundation says.

Looking ahead, the foundation wants to amend Godot's contributing policy to band autonomous AI agent use or "vibe coding," use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code, and AI-generated text in human-to-human communication.

However, the foundation outlines some exceptions. While it requires all code to be human authored, AI should "should be limited to menial things," including code completion, regex, or find and replace. If someone uses AI in some capacity to author code, the person must disclose it in the PR discussion.

Regarding communication, the foundation says that maintainers volunteer their time to review a user's issue, PR, or proposal they do not want to talk to a machine. "This is a basic principle of respect," the post reads. Yet, machine translations "are still acceptable" as long as the original content was written by a human.

The announcement of upcoming policy updates comes weeks after Godot confirmed that it tolerates "some AI assistance," while also rejecting the "vibe coded" tag. Back in February, Godot veteran Rémi Verschelde expressed dismay at the number of "AI slop" PRs being generated for the engine.

"Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available. We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve," the announcement by the Godot Foundation concludes.

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About the Author

Diego Argüello

Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more. He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.