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 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.
+1 to banning AI projects.
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.
Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having actual quality posts.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I think a blanket ban would make people try and hide the fact that something is ai. Like it or not ai isn’t going away. I feel disclosure in either the title or body is the better choice. By all means ban those blatantly not adhering to the disclosure rule though.
Tags in Lemmy would be really helpful here as users could chose yo filter out all ai related posts from their feed, though a similar effect can come through requiring a keyword like “[AI]” to be in the title and a user end keyword filter.
Yes, but then this would need to be paired with a more straightforward filtering system that people actually use.
Otherwise, I’m certain that there’s gonna be many people still annoyed at it, and who will vote negatively when they see something being advertised as AI. And that’s likely going to still incentivize people to not disclose it and try to hide it, with an inevitable cat-vs-mouse chase still.
Alternatively… have a /c/opensource-noai and/or a /c/opensource-ai
I agree. I believe slop is here to stay and the only way is to filter it out. Wanna use AI? Good for you, the rest doesn’t need the slop and it should be filtered out by default / flagged as AI
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.
This is what happened to r/fossdroid and r/opensource
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.
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.
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 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,
Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.
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.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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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
