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.
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.
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.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
As a consumer I hate AI-slopped apps. They activly make the experience worse!
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
