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PayPalWidelands is a free and open source Settlers-like strategy game, and their developers appear to be setting a firm stance against any 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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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ShadowXeldron 8 hours ago
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.
Absolutely love this. I think this is an excellent summary of the whole shebang. It's:
1- ethically wrong
2- legally wrong
3- created by stealing source material
4- resulting in low quality garbage
LOVE. I don't even know this game, but now I do, and I love it! Installing via the cachy repo right now and will give it a go.
Kimyrielle 2 hours ago
Quoting: ShadowXeldronI'd say this is fair. AI generated contributions have significant quality concerns so I'd probably block them as well if I was a maintainer.Not sure how to phrase that without being overly mean to the visuals of that game... But I am not sure in much danger it is from AI generated content having a negative quality impact on its looks.
That they want to play it safe until the legal side is sorted out is a different topic. I probably would, too. Cases currently making it through the system do not indicate any change in the status quo: AI generated content isn't copyrightable, and thus no claims against its use can be made, unless in extreme cases (e.g. using a model to generate images of Queen Elsa, which is a copyrighted character). But I can still understand why they play it safe.
Last edited by Kimyrielle on 20 Feb 2026 at 5:00 pm UTC
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