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Open SourceI 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.
Yes, ban AI usage and the slop it gives
Yes please. No AI at all. Assisted, human reviewed, none of it. Only fully human written code.
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.
I would support the deletion of any post about any project that is not on the "no ai list" or "slop free" lists
Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.
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
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.
My mind is to ban it to preserve open source.
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
Please
Yes please, I'm so tired of seing AI crap projects that will be abandonned in a few months...
i'm so curious what the argument against banning AI slop would even be, lmao
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.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it's possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
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:
- The Linux kernel
- Fedora
- Mesa 3D
- Jellyfin
- Firefox
- Chromium
- Homebrew
- OpenSSL
- FFmpeg
- Curl
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.
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.
Prove to whom, and why? Who entitles anyone to demand "proof of investment" for a piece of work they have zero contribution to?
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.
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.
As a consumer I hate AI-slopped apps. They activly make the experience worse!
+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.
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
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
There's some nuance for sure, but personally I'm a lot less interested in heavily LLM-programmed projects
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.
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?
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.
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.
messy, generated code with little cohesion and only barely functional
Okay, you've described my code. Now what about the AI?
thats mine too
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.
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 to without knowing what everything does and how it interacts
U 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.
Yes. They are useless. Get rid of them.
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 ?)
Yea I think so. If the idea is too controversial we could make an open source AI community so everyone is happy.
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 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.
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.
Yes
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]".
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.
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 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 had a report for AI slop today. 1m LOC in 3 months.
I don't understand this, is it human slop?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
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.
we would have also missed the train of the blockchain and NFTs.
Only an idiot that hasn't used the tech compares LLMs to blockchain or NFTs.
And how could this amazing technology that literally doesn’t have a single positive point,
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.
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.
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.
Are you ok, mate?
Yeah, it feels great to not have AI psychosis, you should try it.
