Create open-source-in-the-age-of-AI.md

Author: nlharris

content/posts/open-source-in-the-age-of-AI.md

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+---
+author: nlharris
+category:
+  - bosc
+  - ismb
+  - community
+date: "2026-03-30T02:30:32+00:00"
+draft: true
+tag:
+  - bosc
+  - ismb
+  - conferences
+
+title: "Open Source in the Age of AI"
+url: /posts/Open-Source-in-the-Age-of-AI/
+
+---
+
+![CoFest 2026 participants](/img/2026-03-29-elephant-and-pears.png)
+
+At BOSC 2026, we want to talk about the elephant in the open-source room: **Is generative AI an advantage or a hindrance to open source?**
+
+We invite abstracts on this topic. Some might be selected to give talks at BOSC (which will be part of ISMB 2026).
+We may also invite some of the chosen speakers to participate in a panel. The [submission deadline](/events/bosc-2026/submit/) is April 9.
+
+For example, here are some possible topics (but don't feel restricted to these):
+
+- Reuse: why does open source matter if there’s now little incentive to reuse?
+- Evaluating open source projects: AI tools can generate thousands of lines of code in seconds. The most costly process is now verifying that code for scientific accuracy (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089). What are some good approaches to address this?
+- Contribution guidelines: balancing scale and utility of AI-assisted development with community-building
+  - How should an open source project assess pull requests from AI agents? 
+  - Are zero-tolerance bans on submissions generated using AI reasonable? (e.g., https://medium.com/@livewyer/ai-disruption-to-open-source-software-oss-377f10be2d8a)  
+  - How can humans and AI agents best work together?
+- Attribution and credit:
+  - How should we recognize contributions in an age of AI-assisted commits?
+  - Transparency:  Should there be mandatory requirements to disclose AI use, including models and prompts used?
+  - Human ownership: should authors always remain legally and ethically accountable for the outputs of their code? 
+  - Licensing: do open source licenses still mean anything when coding agents can translate or reimplement code?
+- Sustainability: who does the long-term hard work of maintaining open source projects when AI does the "easy" work?
+- Credit for training data: part of what AI proposes is reusing existing human-coded work without crediting it. Can there be a way to fairly credit the contribution of an open source project to the (often non open-source) models?
+- When AI is the user: should open source projects be designed for machine consumers?
+- The deadly feedback loop: models are trained on what they produce. Does this really work?
+- Open data in the AI era: balancing access with protection from misuse
+
+We look forward to seeing your thoughts on these topics! Please be sure to [submit your abstract](/events/bosc-2026/submit/) by April 9 if you want to be considered for a talk.