SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) ban AI / LLM code contributions

SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), the incredibly popular cross-platform development library, has formally banned all AI code contributions.

What exactly is SDL for? It's used in various games and game engines to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. It makes cross-platform development a lot easier, stopping developers having to reinvent the wheel for many things.

As of April 15th, their new formal AI policy notes:

AI must not be used to generate code for contributions to this project.

"AI" in this case means a Large Language Model ("LLM"), such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, etc.

AI-generated code is based upon sources of unknown origins and may not be compatible with the Zlib license, or may introduce conflicting license terms if they include code from other projects.

AI can be used to identify issues with contributions to this project, but the solutions to those issues should be authored by humans.

We have found that AI will frequently hallucinate issues that are not actually problems in practice, report incorrect information, and describe problems that are actually not issues at all. If AI identifies a problem with this codebase, please make sure you understand what it is saying and have independently confirmed that the issue exists before submitting a bug report or pull request.

Any pull request to this project will ask you to confirm that you are the author and that you are contributing your changes under the Zlib license.

From the original pull request on GitHub, their policy may evolve over time with more discussions as AI coding tools and LLMs evolve.