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.
A lot of people are making well-reasoned arguments about human nature, the nature of a dangerous tool, defining responsible use, and the challenges inherent in any sort of ban.
The points that look the best to me definitely include tagging, but I haven’t seen suggested any method of gatekeeping as to who has access to the means of dissemination of software. Because the damage by the tool is determined by the one who wields it, only people who have established trustworthiness should be allowed to contribute.
I think the new category - “open source and hand-made/human crafted software” should be introduced
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…
+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.
Never in my life have I wanted to read about or use an AI slop project.
Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having fewer but actually good quality posts.
AI slop is completely against this.
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.
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,
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 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.
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 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
A straightforward filtering system… Like tags?
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
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.
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
