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Openclaw is Spam, Like Any Other Automated Email

Open Source communities are trying to quickly adapt to the present rapid advances in technology. I would like to propose some clarity around something that should be common sense.

Automated emails are spam. They always have been. Openclaw (and whatever new thing surfaces this summer) is no different.

Policies saying automated emails/messages are banned – including anything AI generated – are not only common-sense policies, they aren’t even a change from how we’ve always worked. This includes automated comments on github issues, automated PRs, automated patch submissions, and even any kind of automated review. Copilot automated reviews, snyk, etc – are ok if-and-only-if it’s configured by the owners of the repo/project. Common sense.

Enforcement of these policies – more than ever – depends on trust and relationships. I do think, for example, that non-native-english-speakers should be allowed to use AI to help them check their english. Used responsibly, AI tools can help a lot with language learning! Your grammar checker is probably based on some kind of LLM anyway. But I’m saying that a human always presses the “send” button on the message, and this human is responsible for the words they sent. If moderators suspect automated messages, every open source project should have a policy they can cite for blocking/banning the account.

Tomas Vondra’s article “the AI inversion” is the latest of many good and thought-provoking pieces I’ve read – it’s well worth the read – although he’s getting at deeper problems than what I’m writing about here – and he has very good reasons to have a much deeper level of concern for the impact of AI tooling on open source communities. These are interesting times and we don’t have all the answers yet.

A few more things I’ve recently read, which I think are good:

• CloudNativePG AI policy – https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/governance/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md
• Linux Foundation AI Policy – https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai
• Bryan Cantrill, Oxide RFD – https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576
• Russ Cox on GoLang and AI – https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/4Li4Ovd_ehE/m/8L9s_jq4BAAJ?pli=1
• Jordan Tigani about AI @ MotherDuck – [long painful URL for LinkedIn post]

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I’ve also been writing bits and pieces of partial thoughts over the past week or two – my short blog post about the Scott Shambaugh situation (And thank you to Kim Bruning for the thoughtful email exchanges about this blog! Please continue to keep this old guy on his toes, reasoning through things, and challenging his thinking!)

There have been a bunch of LinkedIn messages too; capturing them here: