Widelands, the open source Settlers-like, devs plan to ban all AI generated contributions

Widelands is a free and open source Settlers-like strategy game, and their developers appear to be setting a firm stance against an AI generated contributions. In case you missed it - back in December 2025 they had a big new release.

Since AI generation is a big topic right now causing all sorts of issues like hardware shortages including HDDs and Steam Decks along with price hikes everywhere, and with AI making a mess of other open source projects, it's interesting to see some projects come out completely against it.

Here's what they said in an announcement:

The Widelands Development Team is drafting a resolution to reject AI-generated content contributions (code, graphics, music, and others) to the Widelands source code and repositories.

We hold that AI-generated content generally stands on dubious ethical and legal grounds, as it violates the copyright of creators whose work was scraped for the AI's training data set without their permission and without due attribution. Also, we find that it is frequently of low overall quality and/or is overly generic and fails to embrace requirements specific to Widelands.

Pull requests that have been generated by AI may in the future be closed without review.

Widelands is created by people, for people.

The change does not impact add-on uploads, which are each add-on author’s own responsibility, although such add-ons may be moderated more critically by the add-on server maintainers.
Translations are also not in the scope of this policy, and every language team can define its own policy with regard to machine translation.

Their policy isn't yet set in stone, as they've opened up comments until February 24th.