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.
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
There’s no value in AI slop and it should be banned from everywhere in all circumstances.
These kinds of threads are great for finding new people to go in my block list.
Yes to ban 👍
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, 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.
What is fully human written and how are you as a human(I assume) able to distinguish between what is laboriously typed and what is generated, here lets try this exercise and see if you can spot any difference Here is a code I have typed by hand
"smash": push rbp mov rbp, rsp call "smash" pop rbp retand here is machine generated code with the prompt, the slop machine used here is a compiler
GCC take this C code void smash(){smash();} and make it executableand here is the output"smash": push rbp mov rbp, rsp call "smash" nop pop rbp retspoiler
please dont take this seriously
I think there are multiple reasons to ban AI slop. One is that it can push out and dilute human-made content.
Another is that AI use is very resource intensive in an age that we’re facing an accelerating climate crisis. Speaking of which, we’re expecting a pretty extreme El Niño season this year.
Another is that AI companies are lobbying the US federal government in bad faith (up to and including the current discussions of slowdown), and really don’t deserve any support or patronage.
I don’t know if you were aware, but burgerland doesn’t have a monopoly on LLM development. And nowadays there are competent models you can even run locally that work just fine for coding.
This whole trope that AI is very resource intensive is completely outdated, while people like you just keep parroting it uncritically. You’re certainly not going to be solving extreme climate change by banning LLM assisted code on a niche community. This is the most lib brained take ever.
I strongly disagree with this. The reality is that using LLMs to build things is becoming increasingly more common. And just because something is built using LLMs doesn’t automatically make it slop or useless. There are plenty of genuinely useful open source projects built with these tools, and just because you’re personally opposed to that is not a reason to ban them outright.
This is why we have the voting system on Lemmy as well. If people post slop whether it’s human or LLM assisted, then it can get downvoted naturally. I also see zero evidence of this community drowning in any sort of slop.
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.
I am convinced that, with the right tools, it’s possible to damage 40 years of work within a few weeks.
i’m so curious what the argument against banning AI slop would even be, lmao
It’s the same argument for anything AI: “It’s inevitable!”
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.
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.
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
