Blame/lawsuit avoidance is a powerful motivation to keep things the same. But there's also a very strong drive to reduce costs, and this would be a very enticing cost center, for better or worse.
GitHub itself was reorged under the CoreAI division recently, I think.
For the stability issues, I see it more as a potential tenuous link between having to hyper accelerate the Azure moves with a "you have no excuses because AI makes everything easier" sentiment from above, and then the more obvious literal situation of devs maybe vibecoding infra changes.
No evidence of the latter, just the likelihood, given the incentives.
There are probably enough regions where it is required or will be required soon, that it makes sense to just get it over with.
The Internet is more or less becoming a locked down, controlled and fully observed thing for end users and citizens, so adapting to that world sooner and working within it is just sensible future-proofing.
This also lets them more safely target older users with ads, purchase requests, etc. and new integrations for gambling and other high ROI systems.
GeoIP this nonsense. Legal liability is solved as a "good-faith effort" and those living in jurisdictions where this doesn't apply (or use a VPN) don't need to be stripped of privacy.
There is a bit of an arms race between id verification systems and users bypassing them when AI gen. Which is really just ai generated images vs. AI generated image detection.
In practice, nothing will stop it, the tooling will gradually get better at detecting prior fakes and banning those users while the newer fakes will go undetected for longer.
Putting up the requirement satisfies their CYA requirements here. The race between AI fraud vs. detection is something they can just ignore and let happen on its own.
Another way to think of it is: paying $1 to have your pr and concerns elevated above the supermajority sea (that which will be ai driven contributions). For that cost, it's a steal of the deal.
Then, from the perspective of "it's a donation to a project you care about" it becomes even more rational. But the project itself getting the money has all the problems others have outlined already, so that idea's a bit bust.
But I'm already donating my time by creating a PR, it definitely would disincentivize me to make PRs if I had to also pay in addition to already doing the actual work. Just always such a shame that the good people have to suffer because of the actions of the shitty people...
If that's actually the opinion of the maintainer, why even accept PRs at all? At that point, just categorically deny any. I was thinking more of actual community projects that _want_ community PRs. Those seem to have welcomed my contributions in the past, but of course they were not just AI slop or other low effort PRs.
> Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it?
The entire mode of operation for the current administration is to ignore such things whenever they don't blindly rubber stamp or get out of the way. It has been very successful for them.
Trump has today, explicitly said that the US administration - specifically his administration - will run Venezuela, with boots on the ground, for as long as is necessary.
I was listening to the press conference and almost went back to edit my comment with a note about it. Honestly, coming out of that I have no idea if what is his saying is reality. As things stand and what we know, it doesn't make sense. We don't know about more troops currently on the ground. He said the VP has agreed to assist, but she is publicly saying very different things. I hate we are in a place as a country where we can't believe basic things about important topics our president says.
Also in the Q&A he mentioned this was mostly targeting the protection of the oil extraction/American companies taking over, not the rest of the country.
(tho not sure how much we can really trust what he says)
Hard to say how things would play out.
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