I had a report for AI slop today. 1m LOC in 3 months. How do you even modify and distribute that? I do not think we had a rule against it.
IMHO if we allow, the community gets drowned out by AI vomit and it is harder to see handcrafted loved projects that are easy to modify and distribute.
My mind is to ban it to preserve open source.
Are folk in agreememt with this line? Would love to hear your thoughts.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
Yes
Most important step is to decide exactly where you want to draw the line.
Agreed ! I think a complete AI ban on every element of the project is too strict. But I also have no interest in a massive AI repository with no supervision (and who can supervise a huge AI commit ?)
I think one of the appealing traits of open source is that you can identify what piece of software and hardware does what (and how, if you’re interested). You can post your exact method, and another person can follow along and replicate the result.
But if AI tells you how to build everything, you don’t get the opportunity to learn, and your stack depends on what that particular model thought was best on that particular day. Maintenance also becomes harder if you just did a
sudo apt install whatever Claude told me towithout knowing what everything does and how it interactsU also like that for small private projects you can literally contact the developer for questions/suggestions/comments. There is no point if all they did was ask Claude
The worst is when you see something you’re curious about and ask for clarification, and they just paste your question into the LLM and paste its response back to you.
its like bro I can do that if I want
This was a problem in [email protected] and they’ve done a good job of dealing with it. You could take a look at that past discussion to see what worked / what didn’t.
IMO there is an organized effort behind some of these new accounts pushing AI projects, and you need to deal with it in some form to stop them from coming
Agreed. TLDR, you must tag posts there with the following:
Post Tagging
There are three types of tags for project promotional / AI posts.
- [CBH] - Code By Human - A project promotional post with a project that did not use AI in any capacity. No disclosure necessary.
- [AIP] - AI Project - A project promotional post with a project that used AI in development in any capacity. Disclosure is required for how it was used.
- [AIT] - AI Topic - A discussion topic that includes AI. This may be for a discussion on hardware to self-host on, llama.cpp vs ollama, your experience using vulkan, etc.
Thanks for sharing this. Maybe correct tagging could be useful. Makes it easier to ignore but not overly heavy and possibly toxic.
Thanks for sharing this. Maybe correct tagging could be useful. Makes it easier to ignore but not overly heavy and possibly toxic.
If i am just posting these projects i found which i think are interesting (which i did a lot of). i am now suppose to spend more of my spare time researching if they include AI? I am pretty sure i won’t be able to know most of the time .
There are not a a lot of projects i think people will be interested enough to do a “high effort evaluation”. if anyone is that interested he can just ask, or check out the code which should be fairly rare.
AI has been here for a while. If it would have caused FOSS communities to be flooded by AI it probably would have happened by now. We should try and avoid the bias of risk aversion.
Looking at AI . it reminds me of how for wayland there was constant criticism even if it was just plain wrong and just made people overly scared . the plain wrong stuff was highly upvoted and i didn’t always have time to correct it, plus people being disrespectful discouraged me from discussing it because i didn’t feel it will be productive . now wayland is pretty much accepted as “good” by most of the FOSS social media communities in my experience. when a new technology appears. it takes time and effort to study it deeply and it’s advantages and disadvantages . And i suspect people in social media are often not the first to do that honestly.
Okay, then don’t post these projects if you’re not sure and don’t want to find out.
Yeah I don’t think we need slop projects being posted here. I know a lot of people are using these tools even for personal projects nowadays but tbh I’m not really interested in exploring any project heavily written by AI.
I’m conflicted. I’m anti-AI due to distrust in capitalism and our pseudo-democratic plutocracies, the profit motive to replace the human workforce, the reckless criminal-incompetence of its implementation, and apparent stupidity of the average hairless primate in understanding that you can never trust a correlation engine… but it’s just a tool, and I’ve also found it incredibly useful in my limited and controlled usage; getting it to write small functions or blocks of code, then amending and composing them myself.
How do we determine what is “heavily written by ai”, and all the obvious slop factory bullshit, without banning strong projects who are just leveraging it for legitimate dev work; as a glorified autocomplete, test autofill, etc but still read and validate every line of code?
Like most people, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find trustworthy projects amongst the see of amateur slop, but I think banning it out-right would likely result in many false positives, and ultimately be counter-productive.
As much as I don’t want to depend on metrics, I think a better approach would be to define a bunch of heuristics based on historically-competent projects. Things like defining an upper limit based on LoC vs commit time and number of devs, project age, etc. Ultimately I feel the industry should do what cybersecurity should be doing; moving to some sort of cryptograhically-verified social trust model where engineers/professionals have to build trust in the real world, and take turns in “vouching” for projects and code releases.
“distrust in capitalism and our pseudo-democratic plutocracies, the profit motive to replace the human workforce, the reckless criminal-incompetence of its implementation, and apparent stupidity of the average hairless primate”
I have hair, thank you very much, but seriously get out of my head. The hubris these days is unbelievable.
I’m anti-AI due to distrust in capitalism and our pseudo-democratic plutocracies, the profit motive to replace the human workforce, the reckless criminal-incompetence of its implementation, and apparent stupidity of the average hairless primate in understanding that you can never trust a correlation engine… but it’s just a tool
Doesn’t that whole preamble prove that “AI” isn’t in fact just a tool? Or rather, that it’s a tool designed for all the wrong things? There’s a well known Audre Lorde quote that springs to mind.
the problem with “just a tool” is that using it will inherently change how you act.
Best concise way i can put it is that it’s like how better hardware has largely just resulted in software not really caring about efficiency any longer.It is just a tool, but human nature makes it a net negative. There are a lot of tools like that, and history shows that once the cat is out of the bag, humanity just has to live with the damage that tool causes. There’s literally nothing that can be done to stop it on a large scale, but small communities can always dictate what they will tolerate.
Yeah, exactly.
As someone who has been working on a large open source project for literally years, while trying to support a family, the hardest thing is time to devote to this project (which, absent capitalism, is what I’d spend my life doing).
AI can allow me to instead increase the speed at which I’m delivering the project I’d already architected, designed, and laid out with my other devs. I don’t have the money to pay myself to work on it, much less other devs - and my bank doesn’t take repo stars as mortgage payments unfortunately.
I hate the AI industry - but that’s a problem with the economics, not the tool.
I’m happy to label that my project uses AI assistance, but bans just make me realize that wherever is banning it isn’t more concerned with shipping a solution instead of a crusade against LLMs.
I’m fine with AI. I’m not fine with slop. Ban slop, not LLMs.
You are the same.
LLMs are slop.
Sorry about the downvotes, Lemmy has a big coding community (naturally, in this comm), and that seems to be the sector where people are the most hypocritical about “AI” usage.
Well, fuck… how could I possibly win such a well-versed argument like that?!
No, you!
- someone with zero experience using AI to blindly create something barely functional, feeding in errors until it gets a working version. No checking for vulnerabilities, testing, error catching, no thought on architecture or scalability.
- someone carefully using AI in a controlled manner to create open source software. They spend days making sure that is reliable, scalable, secure, and that the project is quality.
You believe these two are them same? That both are equal slop? Quite frankly, I don’t care if an AI made most of the code for an open source project as long as it is made well, and allows me to get away from awful proprietary alternatives. If the output of an AI is distinguishable from a quality programmer, idk how that is also slop.
By definition a quality programmer wouldn’t want to use an LLM. Just like a quality architect wouldn’t want to build a house by making monkeys throw bricks in a pile, with the excuse that he goes after them to fix it.
I’d actually say that the “quality” dev that vibe codes is worse, because it often comes with an ego that leads to them wanting to hide that they use AI, or to hide the fact that no, they don’t master their code nearly as much as if they wrote it by hand, and it leads to more crap.
I don’t know how many more studies proving that LLMs are crap we’ll need before the slop stops.
Just like a quality architect wouldn’t want to build a house by making monkeys throw bricks in a pile, with the excuse that he goes after them to fix it.
If the result of the monkeys throwing bricks in a pile is indistinguishable from a team of builders, what does it matter how it got there. If the end result is a pile of garbage, of course it’s unusable and a waste of resources. It’s about the end result.
I don’t know how many more studies proving that LLMs are crap we’ll need before the slop stops.
Imagine if in the year 2000 someone said “how many studies does it take to show computers are slow before we stop wasting time on them”. It’s a technology. Whether you like it or not, this moment is the worst the technology will ever be. The studies you reference are about outdated technology
There’s some nuance for sure, but personally I’m a lot less interested in heavily LLM-programmed projects
that’s completely fair - would labeling then be ideal for you?
Fair enough, I don’t have said decades of experience
Yes. They are useless. Get rid of them.
Let people choose by their owns. In my client, I can filter by texts; I already used to hide some topics. Maybe it’s more convenient to include a tag in the title. For example: if your contribution/project is made by or include generated content from a LLM, include the tag [AI]. That way, anyone can hide these contributions by filtering by the text “[AI]”.
Yeh I’d prefer no slop. You’d probably also need to clarify what the definition or threshold for this might be. Just the code? Slop docs? LLM used for any aspect whatsoever? Other communities must have a definition that might help. But your goals with it as stated are sound. Let’s not drown in vomit.
I had a report for AI slop today. 1m LOC in 3 months. How do you even modify and distribute that?
That makes some sense but does “AI slop” here refer to code with this type of problem or all code made with AI assistance?
I for one would really appreciate just one single FLOSS community that flat out banned any and all “AI” contributed code instead of following the approach of others. Somebody have the spine to stand out, plz.
I’m not a developer, but I wanna be able to keep up with open source news without having to navigate a slippery slop(e) into clanker dominated territory.
That restriction would rule out Linux. Would that be OK?
There are plenty of Linux communities already 🤷
The Zig language has a no AI contributions policy. That’s for the language itself, but a lot of it’s community have similar views.
Codeberg has a no AI policy for projects hosted on its servers, so anything hosted there should meet your requirements.
I was talking about Lemmy communities, but yeah.
Let people choose what they want to see.
People here tend to call any hint of LLM use “slop”, and arguing on a threshold is a waste of everyone’s time that will end up disappointing most. Tag it and let people choose.
Bro one million lines of code in three months is slop, without me having even read the code.
I made the report and I’m definitely pro AI when it’s used responsibly. Sadly about 95% of AI usage nowadays is irresponsible, unmaintainable, vibe-coded bullshit not even the prompters understand.
I’d like the 95% to be banned and the other 5% to be tagged.
the post is not about this 1M LoC project, it’s about creating a ban for whatever the mods decide it’s slop
What I wanted to say is: I’m pretty sure we can trust the community and moderators to recognise the difference between slop and AI assistance.
yeah, and I disagree. People have different opinions on this. A 1M LoC slop project is an extreme that is not representative of what shows up here.
I like this idea. Tag it. Mandatory disclosure. People should just be honest about the amount of AI they used and how.
“I vibecoded this awesome thing with 100k LOC in a weekend, check it out” vs “I used AI to help with planning and architecture, but wrote the code myself” are two very different things.
You have it backwards. It’s better to keep a tight grip on planning and architecture than implementation of individual functions.
I’m not making a value call, I’m saying they are two very different things.
I would support such a ban so long as there is some process to prevent it becoming a witch hunt.
I have personally already received one false accusation of using AI in this community and I wouldn’t want to continue posting projects here if it becomes an atmosphere of suspicion.
Maybe we use AI to detect the bad AI, and then blame that AI when it doesn’t work?
Why any efforts to blame? No need to blame Ai. Just use an Ai that blames other failing Ai. Modern problems require modern solution.
One? I’ve received three. It seems you have to dumb down your responses, and add some intentional typos if you don’t want the mob after you lately.
Yea I think so. If the idea is too controversial we could make an open source AI community so everyone is happy.
I’m team “no slop allowed”, but you have to define what slop is somehow.
I think there’s a bunch of metrics to consider, but it might be difficult to assess as a mod.
What happens if AI gets good enough in like 5-10 years to (largely) no longer fit the created definition of slop? Do we revise the definition to be more restrictive, allow the content, or block AI content all together.
The answer to this question determines if it’s really about the quality of the content or if it’s more about the fact it is computer generated.
We consider the issue at that time.
Other things will also change.
Maybe I will have thrown my computer gear in the river.
Maybe there will be other communities who reject AI content, or others who embrace it.
Maybe the zombie apocalypse will have arrived.
Seriously though, it’s about the quality of the content. IMO we want to avoid unsustainable projects where someone has vibe-coded some unmaintainable mess. Other long lived projects with responsible AI use are less problematic.
You shouldn’t worry about all the what ifs, you deal with the now and adjust as things change. This is a lemmy community not a government law.
This was more so rhetorical to try to get to the root of why people are wanting it banned. For many, they dislike AI and are coming up with any other excuse to validate their feelings, such as “bad quality”. It’s a valid position on its own to just not like AI, and if that’s how people feel that’s what the rules should reflect. If it’s truly just about quality, then it would be fine if everything was AI as long as it was high quality. I imagine most people don’t want the latter, but that seems to be more what the conversion should be addressing
