KDE users and contributors launch campaign demanding a generative AI ban in Plasma

A community of KDE users and contributors has launched the KDE for People campaign, an initiative calling on the KDE Project to adopt a No-AI policy for the Plasma desktop and related components. The page, published in recent days, has gathered hundreds of signatures from people in and around the project.

What the campaign asks for

The campaign states that KDE "should place a ban on Generative AI in Plasma and Plasma Components," and adds that other parts of KDE should be considered as well. In its scope, the ban would cover outputs of generative AI tools in code and assets, as well as their use for merge-request descriptions, issues and translation work, such as the .po files handled by localizers. The group also wants related community spaces examined in order to prevent vibe-coding and keep AI topics out of Akademy and KDE Planet.

According to the organizers, the ban should stand on "a pro-people outlook to community, ethics and with respect for the work that has gone into KDE software and projects for decades." They write that the point is not to measure the exact share of AI in any single commit — "things will slip through" — but to signal to the outside what kind of community KDE is.

Arguments and examples

The campaign argues that generative AI erodes trust in the project, makes code more difficult to review and harms privacy, and it points to an Amnesty International analysis of the technology's effects. As precedents, it lists projects that have already taken a stance against AI, among them Zig, elementaryOS and OBS Studio. The group also notes that KDE Eco has declared a policy allowing AI use within KDE to be incompatible with KDE Eco's goals and values.

The organizers say they launched the initiative amid what the page describes as uproar within the KDE community and KDE projects over a draft policy that would have permitted AI use.

The policy debate in KDE

The campaign responds to a proposed policy discussed in KDE's development tracker; the original link no longer works, and the campaign points to an archived copy. In the group's reading, the proposal pushed responsibility onto individual contributors while ignoring wider human-rights concerns, and settling the policy without broader community involvement "works against the interest of the public on the issue."

The organizers write that a ban "shouldn't mean this ban would be eternal," but add that there is no truly ethical LLM or diffusion model on the market right now that would align with Amnesty's analysis. In a note at the end of the page, the organizers and signees state that they do not condone harassment of anyone involved in or in support of the proposed policy.