Ban AI Slop?
pinned
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m fine with AI. I’m not fine with slop. Ban slop, not LLMs.
Fair enough, I don’t have said decades of experience
You are the same.
LLMs are slop.
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.
There’s some nuance for sure, but personally I’m a lot less interested in heavily LLM-programmed projects
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.
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.
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
Well, fuck… how could I possibly win such a well-versed argument like that?!
No, you!
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.
This was a problem in !selfhosted@lemmy.world 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.
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.
On /c/selfhosted, you share someone else’s project without the disclosure. Age of account requirement is still there, though, has to be at least 30 days old.
If youre aware of some level of ai involvement when posting, its encouraged to mention. If they have an ai disclosure in their repo and you link it, even better.
But since its impossible for a 3rd party to know development details, disclosure doesn’t apply. Assuming something similar is done here, that wouldn’t be a concern.
Okay, then don’t post these projects if you’re not sure and don’t want to find out.
@CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml if you have any questions on those rules, please let me know.
The disclosure was needed because there is a wide variety of LLM use, which you can see in the explanation post as well. There is a rather wide difference between “I used an LLM to summarize my changes in the readme” and “I generated everything here from a single prompt”.
The disclosure addresses that part, while the tags allow people to choose what to interact with or what to filter.
Both the Linux Foundation and the EFF have permissive policies towards AI generated code, even Linus Torvalds accepts it as a tool.
Some FOSS projects that have AI generated code in it:
Should we ban them all? If so, this community would be either dead soon OR it would be hypocritical.
Or because they started pre-AI it’s ok now? Shouldn’t we care more about disclosure, policies, licensing, code quality and maintainability?
Users should downvote crappy software and crappy devs, regardless of the tool it was written with.
Experienced developers using AI as a tool and properly understanding their code base are not slop.
AI slop is when someone with no software development experience prompts a piece of software into existence without any understanding of how that piece of software actually works. The project’s are usually heavily pushed by their creators in the initial couple of weeks of creation but are then quickly abandoned when the creator finally realizes neither they nor their AI can maintain the project. Essentially these kinds of projects flood the internet with low quality abandonware.
A newly created open source project coded using AI would be fine if the creators could prove that they understand how to maintain the project and keep it going beyond the initially promoted code and that kind of proof can only come with time.
The big problem is the sheer volume of low quality projects that get abandoned will cause the projects that actually have potential to become needles in haystacks.
Prove to whom, and why? Who entitles anyone to demand “proof of investment” for a piece of work they have zero contribution to?
They already are. I don’t have numbers, but pretty sure the ratio between useful and useless repos on github is… Not high
Proof to the future user-base they are trying to attract by posting about their project. Proof to the community they are trying to be part of that they are not wasting everyone’s time.
Before posting about your project just show that you are making an effort to maintain it, show that you’re willing to engage with people and not just pass everyone’s questions into an LLM and regurgitate the response.
Don’t foster engagement if you’re not going to do the bare minimum to maintain the project.
Yes there are tons of repos out there that don’t deserve any attention from the community, not just AI slop. But there are far more AI slop projects being posted to communities online where the project is instantly abandoned.
Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
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.
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.
That restriction would rule out Linux. Would that be OK?
There are plenty of Linux communities already 🤷
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.
Yes please. It’s dispiriting to regularly go through the cycle of seeing an interesting project pop up here, oh wait it’s vibe-coded crap, nevermind…
At a bare minimum, it would be nice for users to tag their projects accordingly. You could, with a glance, realize there wouldn’t be a point in investing your time/energy into a project that the creator had less investment in, themselves.
yeah, I’ve since seen the suggestion for enforced tagging in the top comment, and I agree that it could be a good solution for allowing users to decide for themselves if they want to engage
That seems to be the standard for everything else. Anything generated by AI should have a disclaimer.
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
We allow it on our large subreddits on reddit. What we do is use a bot to filter repos that are less than 3 months old.
People who vibe code slop just want to share their thing and then abandon it. A limit like that or even 6 months will kill majority of this sort of low effort crap. Most of these people just let Claude or whatever sign the repo as well, another easy way to catch slop.
Developers that develop and only use AI as a tool build great products still as they review all their code.
A blanket ban is just going to make people be more sneaky.
Vibe coded code whose “author” understands the language and actively challenges the agent for his decisions in the interest of long term window is OK. Vibe coded coded that are one-off without any future prospects should be 100% banned.
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 ?)
Just ban low effort content, AI or human made slop both count and have no value.
What about high effort slop? Seems like a new category that’s growing unfortunately…
Yes. They are useless. Get rid of them.
I’m in favor just requiring AI-generated code to be tagged in some obvious place in the post. If there’s a full restriction on it, I think quite a few people would just try to hide the fact that it was vibe-coded and post anyway,
yes to a ban, these projects are worthless to most but their authors. and good for them, but they can keep their trash for themselves.
like 95% of new foss projects i see pop up are heavily ai-generated, and often in very unsubtle ways (line half the commits being “co-authored by” claude, that sort of thing)
it would be nice to have a community where we can share and discuss projects made by humans, so they don’t drown in the llm bile
+1 for the option self hosted went with - AI use must be labeled. It allows those of us that don’t want to see it to easily filter it out.
I saw that million lines of code in 3 months but also when I saw the post title I really just had a feeling that’s what it was to begin with. On one hand it’s kinda cool that just about anyone can make a program that does what they want, but on the other side of it I understand LLM generated code and bot submitted pulls are literally killing beloved FLOSS projects. This greatly saddens me. A good friend of mine quit contributing to projects she used to enjoy helping develop because rather than read her code, an LLM the lead dev fed it through claimed her code was AI generated. It’s fucked and causing brain rot of the worst kind.
But I also want to acknowledge that in the hands of a professional developer/coder LLMs are a valuable tool. But a person needs to be able to read and understand and verify the generated code… All this to say is that I think we need a sane and nuanced approach. Let’s not start a witch hunt, let’s just put labels on boxes and let the community decide what it wants to view or filter out.
For me the most important thing is that something is free software. I’ve seen people advertise proprietary stuff in this community and have reported it, and nothing has been done. I don’t know if that means my reports don’t federate properly or if it’s tacitly approved by the moderators. I know in the degoogle community there are "trusted’ proprietary apps that are often recommended but this should not be the case in a free software or open source community. In any case, any rule that bans “AI slop” while allowing proprietary products is in my mind backwards.
Regarding “AI slop” I am generally in agreement with Codeberg’s policy which states,
I suppose “mostly” is up to interpretation but for me this specifically targets vibecoded apps where there is no or very minimal human involvement. This may be heterodoxy but I actually don’t think “an otherwise human-written codebase with a single line of LLM code” is the same thing as an entirely LLM generated codebase. I think there’s room for nuance especially if the usage is disclosed (I don’t think punishing transparency should be encouraged).
Yes, please ban them. If not, soon this space will get overrun with those losers. This is what happened to r/fossdroid and r/opensource. 90% of posts there are from sloppers. It got really bad to the point regulars stopped participating, and now these subreddits are mostly just sloppers congratulating each others. Every post reads the exact fucking same, every project looks fucking similar, even comments. These people barely put effort anywhere.
This is a community for people to share and communicate, else we can all just talk to LLMs. Please don’t let that happen to this community.
At the very least, make posters require to have an AI tag on their posts and a separate day for them to showcase their “projects”.
Please don’t reply saying but Linux uses LLMs, or other whataboutisms. There is a significant difference between code quality from people submitting to Linux and a slopper who vibecoded a project thinking they’re helping.
I have to admit i don’t think there is a significant drop in quality in r/opensource . and honestly reddit is declining in quality as it gets more popular IMO so i am not sure correlation implies causation even if it exists.
Problem is “AI slop” basically means “bad AI code” which is subjective. i am sure the guy from xlibre thinks xorg is terrible .
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.
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.
Maybe start out with strict labeling guidelines. If it’s AI then it should be labeled as such. If a user posts something that’s Ai and doesn’t label it then ban that user. Maybe a warning first up to you.
But if the choice is between blanket everything allowed or blanket ban I lean more toward blanket ban.
Maybe someone should open a ticket with Lemmy devs to add a user side option for “show ai” next to “show nsfw”.
I don’t block nsfw, but I do block image posts. I’d love to be able to wholesale block all AI tagged posts too.
PieFed has an option for blocking AI-generated posts
how does piefed know if a post is AI? do they have some kind of algorithm which detects AI?
No, it relies on user tagging when creating a post, so sadly only works for posts made by PieFed users for now:
I think using an algorithm would be treacherous territory bc there would be guaranteed false positives.
Since speaking directly to the proposed change didn’t do much, here’s an alternative to “banning ai slop”:
Ban the thing that’s happening. If there are too many “low effort” posts, ban low effort posting. If there are too many posts about non open source packages, ban posting about non open source software. If you really don’t want people self promoting with open source (a thing they’ve been doing for decades!) then ban self promotion.
The problem with all the things I just suggested is that they require serious consideration on the part of a moderator. “Is this post too low effort?”, “is this person promoting themselves in a way the community doesnt want?” and “is this post even about open source?” Are questions that require moderator effort. “Was the repo signed by Claude?” Takes no effort to answer.
Of course kicking kids out of the sandbox for not playing right kind of defeats the purpose of a sandbox and placing unnecessarily high barriers to entry on the commons defeats the purpose of a commons but what the hell do I know…
The biggest problem I’ve seen with the “use AI help but you’re ultimately responsible for what you submit” approach is that it’s damn near impossible to usefully define or enforce what “responsible” actually entails.
Yeah that’s the problem: accepting that there is some other failure happening, broadly defined as a lack of “q” factor, forces people to grapple with the fact that open source has historically been the purview of the bad programmers self promoting their learning projects.
There are cases to the contrary of course and that’s not the rule, but no one cared about these behaviors until now and their care is all focused on ai use as opposed to the behaviors of the programmer in question.
Your response is a perfect example: even though you’re declaring what the person is responsible for you can’t articulate what the consequences of that responsibility are.
I’m not picking on you either, this has been a problem for thirty years, oh you just graduated? Grind away at the gnu tools or some open source stuff so you have something to point at in interviews. Youre reimplementing an x feature in windows having finished a book on c++? Throw it up on sourceforge.
define slop. it means different things to different people.
I thought it was “messy, generated code with little cohesion and only barely functional”, but really it’s the cohesion part.
Okay, you’ve described my code. Now what about the AI?
thats mine too
Oh man don’t look at some of my earlier repos while I was learning then.
Completely vibe coded - yes
AI assisted - no
The problem is, at what point becomes it just Ai assisted. And who decides and how to proof this. These uncertainties are part of the problem for rules like these. Not only is it difficult to decide and time consuming, it also creates friction in the community. Note, I am not against having this rule. It’s just, it is such a depressing situation.
Autocomplete in your favourite IDE is basically AI assisted too.
I think a reasonable line in the sand is: Does the author of the PR understand what they’re doing with this PR and how/why it works? If the PR is complex (like a whole new feature) then the author should be challenged on parts of it even if it looks OK at first glance.
Yes, if the Autocomplete uses Ai features then it is Ai assisted. But what about searching for bugs? Nothing is Ai created in this case, but it is Ai assisted. Even if you did not incorporate any generated code from the Ai model.
And what about projects who do not disclose it? We have to deceiver and guess if its just Ai assisted or has some parts that are Vibe coded. This is what I mean it gets time consuming, and adds friction. How do we even know if this was not just copy pasted from the web (which seems to be okay for smaller stuff), and how do the person know if the copy pasted code was created by an Ai assist? They might not even know if they are honest.
Yes please. No AI at all. Assisted, human reviewed, none of it. Only fully human written code.
What is fully human written and how are you as a human(I assume) able to distinguish between what is laboriously typed and what is generated, here lets try this exercise and see if you can spot any difference Here is a code I have typed by hand
and here is machine generated code with the prompt, the slop machine used here is a compiler
GCC take this C code void smash(){smash();} and make it executableand here is the outputspoiler
please dont take this seriously
I can tell the second was generated because you said it was, dummy.
/s
+1 to banning AI projects.
Yes please, I’m so tired of seing AI crap projects that will be abandonned in a few months…
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]”.
i’m so curious what the argument against banning AI slop would even be, lmao
It’s the same argument for anything AI: “It’s inevitable!”
it’s the future, just like blockchain and NFTs. I mean really if you don’t marry an LLM right now (ignore the gun i’m holding to your head, don’t change the topic) you’ll just go mad at some point as everyone else leaves you behind…
LLM are different from blockchain and NFTs in the sense that on company developing those had trillion dollar evaluation.
At the very least have the post author mark it as having AI involvement. Idk if there’s an equivalent to reddit automoderator but any new app sharing post should be autoreplied by the automod to mark AI involvement.
Or some kind of tagging.
Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having fewer but actually good quality posts.
AI slop is completely against this.
Yes, ban AI usage and the slop it gives
Yea I think so. If the idea is too controversial we could make an open source AI community so everyone is happy.
Please
Greg is vibe coding a tool that he needs. Greg does not share it or monetize it since Greg knows this tool is likely unmaintainable shit and buggy asf. Be like Greg.
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 don’t understand this, is it human slop?
AI is here and not going away. Almost every programmer I know, professionally and hobby, uses it to a greater or lesser extent.
We have plenty of crap software in foss that was authored by people, always have, even when it was called public domain. I’ve certainly shared crap code going back over three decades and I don’t need a clanker to make it bad.
Bad software gets rejected or unused because it’s not very good. Why can’t those same standards apply whoever or whatever created it?
The only thing I think is important, is to be honest.
You’re right, AI is here to stay.
Thank god people like you exist, or we would have also missed the train of the blockchain and NFTs.
And how could this amazing technology that literally doesn’t have a single positive point, and has a lot of points ranging from slightly negative to completely immoral and illegal, ever go away? I don’t see how, at least Grok said so in the middle of a paragraph telling me that nazis were right and that I should go kill minorities and vote for Trump.
You are either ignorant or lying. There are many positive points with AI. Just because the negatives outweigh the positives for you doesn’t mean it “literally” doesn’t have a single positive point.
Yup, LLMs are wonderful.
They provide anyone with access to knowledge that only about half the time is misleading in some way, but is just as persuasive as an expert explanation of the truth.
By automating writing, coding, and data analysis, LLMs remove any need for humans to understand how to express nuanced thought, how to clearly and safely execute a technical process, or how to extract insights from large amounts of information.
By automating customer‑service tasks, LLMs remove the last vestige of a human who can understand why a corporate process is failing a customer and find a way for the system to meet their needs. And as a bonus the LLM can confidently declare ‘facts’ that aren’t true.
LLM‑driven tools can assist clinicians with literature summarization (reinforcing training-data bias, eliminating the actual point of scientific papers, and making lots of errors), patient communication (eliminating any human contact and care towards vulnerable patients), and preliminary triage (with extra training data bias and distracting the doctor from reading the not-written-down actual human presenting symptoms in front of them)
Artists, writers, musicians, and game designers use LLMs as co‑creators, generating drafts, ideas, or entire works that rehash old works and remove any pesky ‘artistic expression’, as the LLM is much faster at making a polished-looking end product, and it’s not like people ever come up with new insights during the revision process.
Advanced multilingual models translate and transcribe minority languages, ensuring that no one ever need learn the language of their cultural heritage, as they have an English approximation that’s totally good enough.
And the best part is this can scale to billions of people, meaning that no one will ever need to be knowledgeable, or know how to write, code, analyze data, do customer service, read a scientific paper, talk to a patient, observe someone to understand their current state, or have to learn anything about other languages or cultures. Just trust in the often wrong but-who-cares-stop-complaining LLM!
You seem to not understand something here. Even if we take your points at face value, which they are quite off, but regardless, lets jump back a few more years to the computer / phones / the calculator. People were saying the same thing about being able to do complex or even basic math. Guess what? I haven’t needed the ability to do any of that Math in my head for atleast 20 years now. “You wont always have a calculator!” yes, I have always had one since then.
Its the same with most of your points, you’re afraid that people will forget how to code? If the LLMs can do the coding in your place well enough for you to forget it, obviously it can do well enough to where you can shift your focus and skill set to something else that works alongside the LLMs.
If you were actually in the professional world where people are using and learning alongside these new tools, you wouldn’t be so dismissive about it.
That’s what I don’t get. Do these people not have a working job? Are they driving a truck or doing manual labor? Do they work as a store clerk? Are they all stuck in the creatives industry?
Like, if you’re sitting in front of a computer as part of your job, you’re using LLMs. And if you aren’t, you’re probably using them indirectly and don’t even know it.
This is a gross generalisation. If you don’t use Google (or use a search operator to go straight to its Web results), and disable Copilot in Windows/Office, that takes care of the most annoying instances of corporations pushing LLMs on you. In my experience, in more specialised software AI features tend to be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Are you ok, mate?
Yeah, it feels great to not have AI psychosis, you should try it.
Only an idiot that hasn’t used the tech compares LLMs to blockchain or NFTs.
Again, hasn’t used the tech, and you’re stuck in defiant rage mode.
“You can’t criticize my sect unless you’ve been part of it” is a strong stance.
I know enough about this “technology” and the studies around it to know that it’s worthless. Just like NFTs that so many people were drooling on.
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.
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.
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.
Yes
There’s no value in AI slop and it should be banned from everywhere in all circumstances.
the problem is what do we call “AI slop”? what will be the criteria? its more nuanced than this
While I’m personally against AI coded projects I’ve noticed more and more that the best projects for my homelab have either turned into AI coded projects or started as one. I first and foremost look into alternatives and weigh in if the features in the AI coded projects are needed over the one that isn’t. But it’s been harder and harder over the years and months to find projects without it.
While I see the different spectrums of fully supporting it, to seeing it as a tool to outright hate it and disregarding everything with it completely I’m mostly curious where does the line go?
When can you spot a good developer that uses it and when can you spot a bad one?
1 million lines of code in one month from a hugely experienced coder vs a developer with none?
Without deeply vetting the developer and their history and their other projects code how would it be best done?
I only really do SvelteKit stuff for example, some bash scripting too, so I can’t spot code efficiency in other languages like Rust or Go.
I’m on the stance that I always avoid to the best of my ability AI coded projects because I don’t believe that AI can generate code that is efficient and secure in the long run. I know of a few self hosted projects that has been used to some extent with AI and has gotten reaaaalllyyy bad security patches.
Yeah, I noticed similar too. I’ve been using a game mod for many years that is in active development, and its devs switched to very AI-heavy development earlier this year. They now add new features with lightning speed, but they are noticeably buggier and unreliable.
Yes to ban 👍
These kinds of threads are great for finding new people to go in my block list.
Tag and ‘[AI]’ in title if not ban. But would very much like it if such posts were simply banned. I don’t think the community would loose any value.
I see AI programs more as quick and dirty tools than “Open Source Projects”.
that comparison works quite well to explain why i think it can’t legally qualify as open source, too!
Both ai-generated software and short generic scripts aren’t really unique in any meaningful way, there’s no creativity in it and therefore it really shouldn’t be considered covered by copyright in the first place.
I think there are multiple reasons to ban AI slop. One is that it can push out and dilute human-made content.
Another is that AI use is very resource intensive in an age that we’re facing an accelerating climate crisis. Speaking of which, we’re expecting a pretty extreme El Niño season this year.
Another is that AI companies are lobbying the US federal government in bad faith (up to and including the current discussions of slowdown), and really don’t deserve any support or patronage.
I don’t know if you were aware, but burgerland doesn’t have a monopoly on LLM development. And nowadays there are competent models you can even run locally that work just fine for coding.
This whole trope that AI is very resource intensive is completely outdated, while people like you just keep parroting it uncritically. You’re certainly not going to be solving extreme climate change by banning LLM assisted code on a niche community. This is the most lib brained take ever.
I anticipate for now AI contributions will be from hyperscale compute, rather than from private systems. There is a build cost of home-brew AI engines that is prohibitive for the most of us.
And that doesn’t change that AI content will saturate the community and push out human-made content.
The efficiency of these systems is improving at an incredible speed. You can run local Qwen today on a consumer grade laptop that beats a frontier model from less than a year ago. In a year or two, local models will be the norm for programming. The whole hyperscale compute thing is just a brief mainframe era of this tech. So, using that as an argument is just silly.
Meanwhile, all content is human made because LLMs are just a tool that a human uses. This whole narrative is frankly bizarre beyond belief.
I suppose AI content is human made the way cloth from a power loom is human made.
The problem is still that we are in the hyperscale era, which is driving a lot of social problems, especially here in the States, and is causing a lot of harm.
The current buildout is also being driven by the interests of the owners and regime for nefarious purposes.
So long as data centers are encroaching on neighborhoods, polluting them and seizing needed resources, so long as AI is being used to process mass surveillance, I’m going to see a need to limit its use.
When it comes to this matter, we may just be adversarial.
The whole energy use argument is deeply misguided because it rests on the assumption that the situation would be different without AI tech. That is completely at odds with historical precedent where we already saw the same pattern with stuff like crypto. Other things like streaming media also use huge amounts of energy. Singling out this one particular tech seems strange to say the least. And of course, the actual problem stems from the way capitalism works, and if you’re genuinely concerned about this then focus on that. As long as capitalist relations continue, energy waste will continue to be baked into the system.
And it’s so very American of you to assume that everybody should care about what’s going on in your failed state. The fact is that this tech is being developed in China as well where these problems don’t exist. Which comes back to my previous point that the issue is with the capitalist relations rather than the technology itself.
I do not think a ban would be efficient. It would just force those who use AI to dissimulate it. I see it a bit as drug use, banning hasn’t solved the problem ; and the countries who handled it the best were those regulating the use.
So I think we should look for a good regulation. It is more complicated to set up, but it has a chance to work.
In my mind, it should allow some projects to identify as not using any AI, and request that each project define what is their use of AI. Ideally, we could know this without opening the project (maybe thanks to a badge).
Also, shaming the use of AI only has the same aim as banning it: forcing it to grow hiden and out of control.
I’m fine with a people asking for open source AI models or sharing projects they made with the help of AI but not completely vibecoded slop.
If you adopt a hardline anti ai stance you will just have to reverse it or become an unused backwater.
E: tagging is also stupid because a tag is self imposed and doesn’t discriminate between a person who is careful or otherwise.
what makes you think it would become an unused backwater? The people most vocally anti-AI are also those most likely to actually engage with places like this. And there’s plenty of people here who support banning AI slop on the community so clearly there’d still be people left after you leave.
Because someone will just make c/realopensource and more people will post there than here.
You’re describing a situation where fewer people adopt ai tools for programming or the adoption rate stays the same. That seems unrealistic. I guess you could also be describing a situation where lots of lemmy users start programming and avoid this community because of its ai ban. That seems like it would be bad though, surely you don’t want a bad thing to happen…
Basing the path of a community on what will be tolerated or even boosted by its most vocal members is not necessarily the best choice.
A better path is probably to make a dedicated hand coding community and use that instead of hijacking the extant open source community.
As a consumer I hate AI-slopped apps. They activly make the experience worse!
I think the new category - “open source and hand-made/human crafted software” should be introduced
You can ban it and if circumstances change in the future, the rules can be changed
You will be preserving it alright, but not progressing it in anyway; A blanket ban wont really solve anything, a more sophisticated system would be a pinned comment warning of AI use, which you should eventually rescind if the author proves they have not abandoned the project when their tokens ran out
I would support the deletion of any post about any project that is not on the “no ai list” or “slop free” lists
I strongly disagree with this. The reality is that using LLMs to build things is becoming increasingly more common. And just because something is built using LLMs doesn’t automatically make it slop or useless. There are plenty of genuinely useful open source projects built with these tools, and just because you’re personally opposed to that is not a reason to ban them outright.
This is why we have the voting system on Lemmy as well. If people post slop whether it’s human or LLM assisted, then it can get downvoted naturally. I also see zero evidence of this community drowning in any sort of slop.
If there’s ever a question that starts with “should we ban AI”, I vote yes. Delete the post and ban/block the user, first offense, no negotiation. Period.
Should we ban AI from the list of topics to discuss banning? 😏
eh whatever I will humor you; why? why not have have a healthy discussion regarding this, this zero tolerance policy should be reserved for extreme content not thrown around willy nilly
Ban the use of AI, Stack overflow, and documentation in general. If a human can’t build their functions from scratch using Assembly for every project, then their work is slop. They also can’t reuse their code because copy pasting is ethically wrong even if you know what the functions do.
The interesting thing about this post is that it’s exactly equally as wrong whether you take it as sarcasm or at face value.