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

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.

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.

There are plenty of Linux communities already 🤷

I was talking about Lemmy communities, but yeah.

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 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,

I can tell the second was generated because you said it was, dummy.

/s

Okay, then don't post these projects if you're not sure and don't want to find out.

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..

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.

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.

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.

You can ban it and if circumstances change in the future, the rules can be changed

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

PieFed has an option for blocking AI-generated posts

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.

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.

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.

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.

its like bro I can do that if I want

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....

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 .

Should we ban AI from the list of topics to discuss banning? 😏

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…

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.

how does piefed know if a post is AI? do they have some kind of algorithm which detects AI?

LLM are different from blockchain and NFTs in the sense that on company developing those had trillion dollar evaluation.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ban it, lemmy sets itself apart from places like reddit by having fewer but actually good quality posts.

AI slop is completely against this.

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.

+1 to banning AI projects.

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.

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.

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.

The interesting thing about this post is that it’s exactly equally as wrong whether you take it as sarcasm or at face value.

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 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.

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.

A straightforward filtering system... Like tags?

I think the new category - "open source and hand-made/human crafted software" should be introduced

It is just a tool, but human nature makes it a net negative. There are a lot of tools like that, and history shows that once the cat is out of the bag, humanity just has to live with the damage that tool causes. There's literally nothing that can be done to stop it on a large scale, but small communities can always dictate what they will tolerate.

A perfect example of a tool used responsibly vs a tool in the hands of an idiot.
There's nothing that can be done to make idiots stop idioting.

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.

"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"

I have hair, thank you very much, but seriously get out of my head. The hubris these days is unbelievable.