We’ve been getting a lot of AI coded submissions recently, as well as lots of reports asking to remove them.
Should we remove these posts, or not?
AI slop & AI code is very different. If its just pure vibe coded slop with no oversight or effort, then sure its just junk, remove it.
But a lot of experienced developers now use AI tooling to increase productivity, just because AI was used in the process should be consider it slop?
Agreed. Needs to be disclosed in the title of the post as having AI involvement, and show signs of active maintenance. Anyone can now oneshot some slop that’s nothing but a waste of our time, but it takes good developers to maintain, secure and expand.
5 days old, nope, hasn’t been touched in months, nope. Dozens of active human participants, and/or a reasonable history of active development and to a lesser degree stars or equivalent, sure.
It’s a bit more work for a poster, but I think it can keep quality high for project posts. Should be voted on by the community and made a rule.
Totally agree. The project has to be developed by someone that knows what they’re doing.
The self-hosted community has a very good take in my opinion. Especially facing the fact that new slop vaporware often comes with new accounts that just advertise the “product”.
Disclosure about AI use, account minimums, and mods having discretion to ban obvious junk spam.
Rule 1 says Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
I don’t think any ai projects can claim to be that when their copyright status is debatable and the tooling is worse with how closed their training is.
People against LLM parrot the same arguments again and again that it has simply lost its original meaning.
copyright status is debatable
debatable by who? who is going to settle this debate?, the courts who serve corporate greed?, Legislation made by politicians lobbied by SaaS companies? Anthropic? OpenAi? Microsoft?
The “Copyright is debatable/ its just a plagiarism machine” stance is not the Leftist/ pro FOSS gotcha argument you think it is. The point of the FOSS movement was to have total freedom over software, and that freedom includes the ability to study, learn and use it in ways it was not intended for. To stand as the antitheses of that is make Steve Balmer happy
Since when has development tooling mattered for something to be FOSS? If it relies on propietary software to build or run it then there’s an argument it’s not truly free.
But if we’re saying that anything developed using closed source tools is not allowed then we’ll have to throw out anything that was developed on a mac or Windows PC.
You are just adding your oss preferences to open source here. I too have preferences, like no corp oss, no ads, no logins, no telemetry and so on, but i have to accept oss as oss more broadly.
I would recommend that you set your agent to filter out posts you don’t want, but you would likely rather censor this sub than automate it with an agent…
You’re missing the point he’s trying to make IMO. He’s questioning if software can be categorized as open source, if it is coded by closed source LLMs, that in turn only aquired their database by stealing someone elses intellectual property. It’s a valid question. OSS is more than just “I can see and fork the code”.
But humans do basically the same thing and their brains aren’t open source either
I truly meant it as a debatable question. If LLMs didn’t have massive proven negative ecological and societal impacts, I’m not sure which way I would lean. Since they do, I have a clear personal opinion. But it’s just that. My opinion.
Humans also have massive negative ecological and societal impacts depending on the person/society. I don’t see how whether a human or LLM writes code changes how open source it is.
You are just adding your oss preferences to open source here.
OSS == Open-Source Software, what are you talking about
I would recommend that you set your agent to filter out posts you don’t want
Just to be clear, do you mean that the user’s user agent (lemmy client) should be capable of filtering out posts about vibecoded slop, perhaps by having lemmy communities require such posts to be tagged? Or do you mean that a LLM should curate what users see here?
Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
Did you not read the full rule?
How can something that is inherently closed sourced be in line with that rule?
I’ll tug on that thread… so can we not use Windows or macOS to develop OSS code on? It has to be on a Linux machine? What if the BIOS is closed source or it’s using binary blobs for the video drivers?
I think requiring AI disclosure like how !selfhosted@lemmy.world does is a good approach. Not all projects rely as heavily on LLMs as others.
Definitely need to remove them.
How about making a rule that it is at least six months old and in continued development? This would filter out most slop.
agreed. i think metrics like this are much more practical and useful:
- age of project
- number of stars (not great, but can help show overall interest)
- number of versions/updates
- activiely maintained
if an amazing, maintained tool uses AI, that’s a lot different than a one-night project that’s never been tested and will be abandoned in a week
Require an AI tag for anything written in part or in whole by AI.
I vote remove
I think a disclosure at least in the title of the post should be required. But only if the software is known to be not slop at all. The problem with this approach is, that everyone has their own threshold and definition of what slop means, or are misinformed about the project. Overall I do not think it’s a good idea to ban any Ai contributed or assisted project.
As an example, do you consider Linux to be Ai slop project?
I’m referring to these new projects coded by AI from scratch, not existing projects which have an occasional LLM contribution.
People are submitting a lot of these AI projects recently.
What about project that were developed normally, but later changed to a complete vibe coded slop model? Because if this is allowed, then this would be a loophole basically. Just start a project without Ai, then do all the stuff with it.
I advocate for a disclosure, blanket removal feels like censorship; even vibe coded slop is a project that might generate interest if it was made to solve some problem or showcase a new frontier, nature of OSS will push the slop out of the project eventually.
When I say “slop”, I refer to a huge codebase that does what it advertise but has no documentation on what it does internally and the primary poster cannot adequately explain what it does(code mudball esentially). but if its well documented and looks like it was put together with care, with rhyme and reason than I will defend against calling it slop
remove
Remove.
Remove, and suggest they go start an AI software community. We can’t be monsters to people who might not know better.
Disclosure. If LLMs are used in service of open-source projects, then they are relevant, but clearly many in the community feel that to be negative, and therefore there should be a disclosure. Someone can make open source software using closed-source tooling already, so disallowing one form of tooling entirely is letting a moral reaction interfere with how we understand open source.
Linux would have to be removed from discussion, for example, if all LLM-contributed projects were to be disallowed. I don’t see why rules should be made with explicit exceptions in mind, yet excluding Linux cuts out a huge portion of open source discussion.
I’m mostly referring to these new projects that are AI coded from scratch, not existing projects that might have some LLM contributions.
In my view, starting code from scratch or augmenting existing code with LLMs are equivalent in terms of whether or not they should be eligible for discussion. Both should have a disclosure, and both are worthy of discussing where relevant. If someone uses a bot to advertise a million LLM-started projects or something and overwhelm the community, then this is bad and should be stopped, I suppose.
Remove them
Require a tag but if someone wants to share something that solved a problem for them as an open source project they should be able to.
