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AI Use Guidelines
Second-Hand Tigers welcomes AI tools as helpers, but what we publish must be human-authored, verified, and accountable. These guidelines apply to every repository and wiki in the organization, and they are referenced from each repository's CONTRIBUTING.md.
- AI can help you research, review, organize, and format. It does not write our authored content.
- Raw AI output stays in Issues, labeled and headed as AI-generated. Published pages carry only material you have verified and rewritten in your own words.
- You are responsible for everything published under your name.
Scope: This rule applies to authored content such as wiki pages and teaching material. Administrative documents (policies, templates, license and contributing files) may be AI-drafted if a maintainer verifies every statement, adopts the text, and notes the AI assistance.
Raw AI-assisted material (overviews, research summaries, draft ideas, discussion threads) belongs in Issues, never pasted straight into a wiki page or file.
- Start any AI-generated comment with this header:
AI Generated Overview by [Tool Name] — DO NOT USE VERBATIM, verify information used against citable sources — see AI Use Guidelines.
- Add the matching
ai:*label to the issue so AI involvement is easy to find later.
| Label | Use it when the issue includes |
|---|---|
ai:discussion |
AI-assisted brainstorming, review, or Q&A |
ai:programming |
AI-assisted code |
ai:content-research |
AI-assisted research for written content |
- Verify every claim. Check facts, figures, and citations against a source you can name. AI tools can invent references, statistics, and quotations that look real.
- Rewrite in your own words. Do not publish AI-drafted sentences, even lightly edited ones.
- Quote only what you have verified. Never publish a quotation or attribution an AI gave you without confirming it in the original source, and keep quotes short.
- Disclose AI-generated images and diagrams in the caption or alt text. Do not use them to depict real people.
- Private information. Do not paste anything that could identify a student or another private individual. See the Management of Private Information policy on the .github wiki.
- Confidential material. Do not paste employer-confidential or proprietary information into an AI tool.
Everything in this organization is shared under open licenses (see CONTRIBUTING.md), and you can only license what you authored. The U.S. Copyright Office's January 2025 report on copyrightability concludes:
"Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by-case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements."
— U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (Jan. 2025), Part V (Conclusion)
In practice, AI used as a tool under a human's control can leave a work protected. Text an AI generates from a prompt, without expression the human determined, may not be, and a license notice on that text means little. Publishing your own rewritten words keeps authorship clear, and the Issue history and labels give you a record of how each page was made. The report states the Office's position, which courts are not bound by and which may change. This is general guidance, not legal advice.
Drafted with AI assistance (Claude, Anthropic); reviewed, verified, and adopted by William Docter.
License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. Text quoted from the U.S. Copyright Office report is a U.S. government work in the public domain; this license applies to the rest of the page.