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?
Just make people disclose it in the title
Remove them
I vote to remove myself but I’d be fine with just having to state AI involvement
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.
My secret non-disclosed own policy on projects I control: if I realize you used LLMs, the change will be rejected. There are people who use LLMs but still it’s 100% their change and design, they just didn’t type it by themselves and you cannot figure out.
I’m not anti-AI but would caution you to see what has been done to communities like /r/selfhosted after the vibe coders found it. Every other post is about a project that has severe memory leaks, over engineered code for simple tasks, and significant security risks especially if someone stupidly opens it up to the internet. These people are putting others in danger with their ignorance even if they think they are ‘helping’. Maybe disclosures will work fine for a smaller forum like this, but elsewhere, the sheer volume makes it unmanageable.
Remove.
Require an AI tag for anything written in part or in whole by AI.
remove
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
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?
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.
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.
Depends on the definition. If we go by the definition a lot of users here seem to have, Linux itself would no longer be considered a FOSS project, which imo is completely ridiculous.
If we’re talking about literally vibe coded from the ground up projects where the devs don’t even know what the code inside looks like, yes maybe it should be removed or given a post tag once we have the feature.
Personally I prefer to keep a discussion going even with heavy AI coded projects, we’re living in interesting times and I am convinced to keep an open mind about what engineering will look like going forward and what doors it might open for the FOSS community despite its flaws and negatives.
As others have said in other posts, the cat’s out of the bag. No matter if/when/how bad the AI crash is, if computing is still viable after then there will be AI.
I think eventually it will emerge that the highest quality AI code will be produced by already experienced developers, who can identify when it’s produced slop and fix it, and that will be the case no matter how good the models get.
I of think of it somewhat like managing a team of interns. You give them instructions and they give you code. You still have to know enough to identify if that code meets the requirements and is of good quality.
I’m assuming the majority of posts are slop now, there are a couple of dedicated opensourceai subreddits, I would prefer such a thing existed here as well, with a blanket ban in this one.
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
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 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?
