Before hitting submit I’d worry I’ve made a silly mistake which would make me look a fool and waste their time.
Do they think the AI written code Just Works ™? Do they feel so detached from that code that they don’t feel embarrassment when it’s shit? It’s like calling yourself a fictional story writer and writing “written by (your name)” on the cover when you didn’t write it, and it’s nonsense.
LLM code generation is the ultimate dunning Kruger enhancer. They think they’re 10x ninja wizards because they can generate unmaintainable demos.
From what I have seen Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. seem to be running bots that are going around and submitting updates to open source repos with little to no human input.
You guys, it’s almost as if AI companies try to kill FOSS projects intentionally by burying them in garbage code. Sounds like they took something from Steve Bannon’s playbook by flooding the zone with slop.
Can Cloudflare help prevent this?
I would think that they will have to combat AI code with an AI code recognizer tool that auto-flags a PR or issue as AI, then they can simply run through and auto-close them. If the contributor doesn’t come back and explain the code and show test results to show it working, then it is auto-closed after a week or so if nobody responds.
Damn, Godot too? I know Curl had to discontinue their bug bounties over the absolutely tidal volume of AI slop reports… Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.
Unfortunately it’s a general theme in Open Source. I lost almost all motivation for programming in my free-time because of all these AI-slop(-PRs). It’s kinda sad, how that Art (among others) is flooded with slop…
Then get ready for people just making slop libraries, not because people are dissatisfied with existing solutions (such as I did with iota, which is a direct media layer similar to SDL, but has better access to some low-level functionality + OOP-ish + memory safe lang), but just because they can.
I got a link to a popular rectpacking algorithm pretty quickly after asking in a Discord server. Nowadays I’d be asked to “vibecode it”.
Can confirm the last part. I am in Uni and if anyone ever asks questions on the class groupchats then first 5-6 answers will be “ask chatgpt.”
Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.
This is the perpetual issue, not just with AI: Any system will have flaws and weaknesses, but often, they can generally be papered over with some good will and patience…
Until selfish, immoral assholes come and ruin it for everyone.
From teenagers using the playground to smoke and bury their cigs in the sand, so now parents with small children can’t use it any more, over companies exploiting legal loopholes to AI slop drowning volunteers in obnoxious bullshit: Most individual people might be decent, but a single turd is all it takes to ruin the punch bowl.
This is big tech trying to kill FOSS.
It’s everywhere. I was just trying to find some information on starting seeds for the garden this year and I was met with AI article after AI article just making shit up. One even had a “picture” of someone planting some seeds and their hand was merged into the ceramic flower pot.
The AI fire hose is destroying the internet.
I fear when they learn a different layout. Right now it seems they are usually obvious, but soon I wont be able to tell slop from intelligence.
One could argue that if the AI response is not distinguishable from a human one at all, then they are equivalent and it doesn’t matter.
That said, the current LLM designs have no ability to do that, and so far all efforts to improve them beyond where they are today has made them worse at it. So, I don’t think that any tweaking or fiddling with the model will ever be able to do anything toward what you’re describing, except possibly using a different, but equally cookie-cutter way of responding that may look different from the old output, but will be much like other new output. It will still be obvious and predictable in a short time after we learn its new obvious tells.
The reason they can’t make it better anymore is because they are trying to do so by giving it ever more information to consume in a misguided notion that once it has enough data, it will be overall smarter, but that is not true because it doesn’t have any way to distinguish good data from garbage, and they have read and consumed the whole Internet already.
Now, when they try to consume more new data, a ton of it was actually already generated by an LLM, maybe even the same one, so contains no new data, but still takes more CPU to read and process. That redundant data also reinforces what it thinks it knows, counting its own repetition of a piece of information as another corroboration that the data is accurate. It thinks conjecture might be a fact because it saw a lot of “people” say the same thing. It could have been one crackpot talking nonsense that was then repeated as gospel on Reddit by 400 LLM bots. 401 people said the same thing; it MUST be true!
I think the point is rather that it is distinguishable for someone knowledgeable on the subject, but not for someone is not. Thus making it harder to evolve from the latter to the former.
You will be able to tell slop from intelligence.
However, you won’t be able to tell AI slop from human slop, and we’ve had human slop around and already overwhelming, but nothing compared to LLM slop volume.
In fact, reading AI slop text reminds me a lot of human slop I’ve seen, whether it’s ‘high school’ style paper writing or clickbait word padding of an article.
This was honestly my biggest fear for a lot of FOSS applications.
Not necessarily in a malicious way (although there’s certainly that happening as well). I think there’s a lot of users who want to contribute, but don’t know how to code, and suddenly think…hey…this is great! I can help out now!
Well meaning slop is still slop.
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Look. I have no problems if you want to use AI to make shit code for your own bullshit. Have at it.
Don’t submit that shit to open Source projects.
You want to use it? Use it for your own shit. The rest of us didn’t ask for this. I’m really hoping the AI bubble bursts in a big way very soon. Microsoft is going to need a bail out, openai is fucking doomed, and z/Twitter/grok could go either way honestly.
Who in their right fucking mind looks at the costs of running an AI datacenter, and the fact that it’s more economically feasible to buy a fucking nuclear power plant to run it all, and then say, yea, this is reasonable.
The C-whatever-O’s are all taking crazy pills.
Get that code off of slophub and move it to Codeberg.
Is codeberg magically immune to AI slop pull requests?
No but they are actively not promoting it or encouraging it. Github and MS are. If you’re going to keep staying on the pro-AI site, you’re going to eat the consequences of that. Github are actively encouraging these submissions with profile badges and other obnoxious crap. Its not an appropriate env for development anymore. Its gamified AI crap.
No (just like Lemmy isn’t immune against AI comments) but Github is actively working towards AI slop
If you want to get a programming job, you want a good looking CV. By contributing to prominent open source projects on github, github’s popularity and fancy profile system makes it look real good on a CV.
Github is a magnet for lazy vibe coders spamming their shit everywhere to farm their CVs. On other git hosts without such a fancy profile systems, there’s less on an incentive to do so. Slop to good code ratio should be lower and more managable.
AI crowd trying hard to find uses for AI
I think the open slop situation is also in part people who just want a feature and genuinely think they’re helping. People who can’t do the task themselves also can’t tell that the LLM also can’t do it.
But a lot of them are probably just padding their GitHub account too. Any given popular project has tons of forks by people who just want to have lots of repositories on their GitHub but don’t actually make changes because they can’t actually do it. I used to maintain my employer’s projects on GitHub and literally we’d have something like 3000 forks and 2990 of them would just be forks with no changes by people with lots of repositories but no actual work. Now these people are using LLMs to also make changes…
But all that money can’t be wrong!
So I guess it is time to switch to a different style of FOSS development ?
The cathedral style, which is utilized by Fossil, basically in order to contribute you’ll have to be manually included into the group. It’s a high-trust environment where devs know each other on a 1st-name basis.
Oh BTW, Fossil is a fully-fledged alternative to Git & Github. It has:
- Version-Tracking
- Webserver
- Bug-tracker
- Ticketting-system
- Wiki
- Forum
- Chat
- And a Graphical User-Interface which you can theme
All in One binary
Godot is also weighing the possibility of moving the project to another platform where there might be less incentive for users to “farm” legitimacy as a software developer with AI-generated code contributions.
Aahhh, I see the issue know.
That’s the incentive to just skirt the rules of whatever their submission policy is.
Why people try to contribute even if they don’t work on their codes? Ai slop not helping at all.
CV padding and main character syndrome.
A similar problem is happening in submissions to science journals.
I’ve been writting a lot of code with ai - for every half hour the ai needs to write the code I need a full week to revise it into good code. If you don’t do that hard work the ai is going to overwhelm the reviewers with garbage
So, what you’re saying is, you’re not writing code.
I’m writing code because it is often faster than explaining to the ai how to do it. I’m spending this month seeing what ai can do - it ranges from saving me a lot of tedious effort to making a large mess to clean up
I totally get it. I’ve been critical about using AI for code purposes at work and have pleaded to stop using it (management is forcing it, less experienced folk want it). So I’ve been given a challenge by one of the proponents to use a very specific tool. This one should be one of the best AI slop generators out there.
So I spent a lot of time thoroughly writing specs for a task in a way the tool should be able to do it. It failed miserably, didn’t even produce any usable result. So I asked the dude that challenged me to help me refine the specs, tweak the tool, make everything perfect. The thing still failed hard. It was said it was because I was forcing the tool into decisions it couldn’t handle and to give it more freedom. So we did that, it made up the rules themselves and subsequently didn’t follow those rules. Another failure. So we split up the task into smaller pieces, it still couldn’t handle it. So we split it up even further, to a ridiculous level, at which point it would definitely be faster just to create the code manually. It’s also no longer realistic, as we pretty much have the end result all worked out and are just coaching the tool to get there. And even then it’s making mistakes, having to be corrected all the time, not following specs, not following code guidelines or best practices. Another really annoying thing is it keeps on changing code it shouldn’t touch, since we’ve made the steps so small, it keeps messing up work it did previously. And the comments it creates are crazy, either just about every line has a comment attached and functions get a whole story, or it has zero comments. As soon as you say to limit the comments to where they are useful, it just deletes all the comments, even the ones it put in before or we put in manually.
I’m ready to give up on the thing and have the use of AI tools for coding limited if not outright stopped entirely. But I’ll know how that discussion will go: Oh you used tool A? No, you should be using tool B, it’s much better. Maybe the tools aren’t there now, but they are getting better all the time, so we’ll benefit any day now.
When I hear even experienced devs be enthusiastic about AI tools, I really feel like I’m going crazy. They suck a lot and aren’t useful at all (on top of the thousand other issues with AI), why are people liking it? And why have we hedged the entire economy on it?
Maybe it’s work and it’s required 🤷♂️
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Half of the worlds workplaces are forcing employees to use AI and show proof it was used.
So… leave those already doomed workplaces?!?
Yeah you’re right they should all starve to death instead
If your country lets unemployed people starve its ripe for revolution
Hard to revolt when you’re starving. So people work, and they eat.
Starving is THE motivator for giving the ruling class the french treatment. Look up what started most revolutions: Its starving
That is a question I’n trying to answer. Until I know what ai can do I can’t have a valid opinion.
We know what “AI” can do.
- Create one of the largest and most dangerous economic bubbles in history.
- Be a massive contributor to the climate catastrophe.
- Consume unfathomable amounts of resources like water, destroying the communities that need them.
- Make personal computing unaffordable. (And eventually any form of offline computing; if it’s up to these bastards we’ll end up back with only mainframes and dumb terminals, with them controlling the mainframes).
- Promote mass surveillance and constant erosion of privacy.
- Replace search engines making it impossible to find trustworthy information on the Internet.
- Destroy the open web by drowning it on useless slop.
- Destroy open source by overwhelming the maintainers with unusable slop.
- Destroy the livelihood of artists and programmers using their own stolen works as training data, without providing a useable replacement for the works they would have produced.
- Infect any code they touch with such an amount of untraceable bugs that it becomes unusable and dangerous (see windows updates since they replaced their programmers with copilot, for instance.
- Support the parasitic billionaire class and increase the wealth divide even more.
- Make you look like a monstrous moronic asshole for supporting all that shit.
It maybe being able to save you five minutes of coding in exchange for several hours of debugging (either by you or by whoever is burdened with your horrible slop) is not worth being an active contributor to all that monstrous harm on humanity and the world.
Sounds like that couple that kept rescuing cats that were promptly eaten by coyotes.
With proper prompting you can let it do a lot of annoying stuff like refactors reasonably well. With a very strict linter you can avoid the most stupid mistakes and shortcuts. If I work on a more complex PR it can take me a couple days to plan it correctly and the actual implementation of the correct plan will take no time at all.
I think for small bug fixes on a maintainable codebase it works, and it works for writing plans and then implementing them. But I honestly don’t know if it’s any faster than just writing the code myself, it‘s just different.
reasonably well
hmm not in my experience, if you don’t care about code-quality you can quickly prototype slop, and see if it generally works, but maintainable code? I always fall back to manual coding, and often my code is like 30% of the length of what AI generates, more readable, efficient etc.
If you constrain it a lot, it might work reasonably, but then I often think, that instead of writing a multi-paragraph prompt, just writing the code might’ve been more effective (long-term that is).
plan it correctly and the actual implementation of the correct plan will take no time at all.
That’s why I don’t think AI really helps that much, because you still have to think and understand (at least if you value your product/code), and that’s what takes the most time, not typing etc.
it‘s just different.
Yeah it makes you dumber, because you’re tempted to not think into the problem, and reviewing code is less effective in understanding what is going on within code (IME, although I think especially nowadays it’s a valuable skill to be able to review quickly and effectively).
Eh I don’t disagree with you, it’s just the reality for me that I am now expected to work on much more stuff at the same time because of AI, it’s exhausting but at least in my job I have no choice and I try to arrange myself with the situation.
I sure lost a lot of understanding of the details of the codebase but I do read every line of code these LLMs spit out and manually review all PRs for obvious bullshit. I also think code quality got worse despite me doing everything I can to keep it decent.
Codeberg Anubis when?
Unfortunately Anubis wouldn’t stop the bots, it would just slow them down.
Anubis just adds proof of work, AKA computation, to your requests. It’s why your browser takes a second before it can access the site. It’s nothing for things on your scale, but it’s a fuck ton of time and money for large scraping operations accessing millions of links every day.
For a bot submitting PRs though, it’s not gonna be a meaningful hindrance unless the person is specifically running a bot designed to make thousands of PRs every day, which a lot of these aren’t.
Really unfortunate.
