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Ban AI Slop? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by [M] to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 141 points 1 week ago (22 children)

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.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 week ago* (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Yeah, exactly.

    As someone who has been working on a large open source project for literally years, while trying to support a family, the hardest thing is time to devote to this project (which, absent capitalism, is what I'd spend my life doing).

    AI can allow me to instead increase the speed at which I'm delivering the project I'd already architected, designed, and laid out with my other devs. I don't have the money to pay myself to work on it, much less other devs - and my bank doesn't take repo stars as mortgage payments unfortunately.

    I hate the AI industry - but that's a problem with the economics, not the tool.

    I'm happy to label that my project uses AI assistance, but bans just make me realize that wherever is banning it isn't more concerned with shipping a solution instead of a crusade against LLMs.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago

    "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.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago (14 children)

    I'm fine with AI. I'm not fine with slop. Ban slop, not LLMs.

    We are not the same!

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  • [+] -17 points 1 week ago (11 children)

    You are the same.

    LLMs are slop.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago (8 children)
    • 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.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    There's some nuance for sure, but personally I'm a lot less interested in heavily LLM-programmed projects

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  • [+] -7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    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.

    If the result of the monkeys throwing bricks in a pile is indistinguishable from a team of builders, what does it matter how it got there. If the end result is a pile of garbage, of course it's unusable and a waste of resources. It's about the end result.

    I don’t know how many more studies proving that LLMs are crap we’ll need before the slop stops.

    Imagine if in the year 2000 someone said "how many studies does it take to show computers are slow before we stop wasting time on them". It's a technology. Whether you like it or not, this moment is the worst the technology will ever be. The studies you reference are about outdated technology

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Just like a quality architect wouldn't want to build a house

    As someone who actually went to school for that before tech - architects don't build houses.

    You know who does, in the US? Del Webb and other massive builders, who give the lowest common denominator slop because that's what the economics of the market demand, and the profits of the funding require.

    The problem is almost always the power relationships behind the tools - it's not that the plans are done by CAD or hand that matter.

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