Is "MIT Software License but No AI" Possible?

1 derwoojer 4 6/23/2025, 6:59:04 PM

An old friend of mine teaches programming and is building out a teaching language to try and make sure students don't cheat on intro lessons.

https://github.com/itstheraj/PhraseLang?tab=License-1-ov-file

They put a license in saying that basically AI cannot index this code but I think this is kinda silly and a waste of time. They told me they want to see if they can make "MIT license but no AI" a thing and they hope more open source projects hop on the train.

I do see that if an AI was trained with this in the set it probably obliterates the educational value maybe. I can understand the motivation but uh....

I don't think this would work tho and I want to convince them they are going a little over board LOL - what do y'all think? Is it possible to make an "MIT License but no AI?" and have it be a thing?

Comments (4)

JohnFen · 6h ago

It's legally cogent, but it's hard to see how enforcement would be possible.

foxmoss · 8h ago

I mean thinking about students as actors of pure bad faith, a student could easily copy and paste any instructions given to them into a LLM and bypass any required training data. Even if an AI company respects the license and the source does not end up in the training set, model knowledge tends to be generalizable to a given area. The only way I could see making a language that is intentionally obtuse to write in (brainfuck or really any other esolang seems to work), but that fails at being a good introductory programming language.

derwoojer · 8h ago

Yeah I think that's a good point. Making something hard for AI to learn is hard for humans too.

My argument was like "how would you even prove that it trained on it bro?" and I think that's kind of a hard thing to do as well.

iab · 8h ago

Open source (classical) & use-restriction is kinda at-odds, so it doesn't really make sense. That's not to say people don't do it - you can restrict the software however you want, it's just not open source (maybe look at some equivalent of Ethical Source?)

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Is "MIT Software License but No AI" Possible?

Comments (4)