Based on recent comments this feels like a discussion we should have. So…topic, basically.
I’m not looking to be chief noisemaker on this, but I stand by what I wrote in !privacy and what’s in my post history.
https://lemmy.ml/post/48724623/26190950
Let’s have at; do we want a [AI] and [NOT AI] tag. Why or why not?
I think [AI] tags would be good. That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty. [NOT AI] seems redudant since we’ve already defined [AI], but again for quick filtering purposes, I see no harm in both.
Having both an [AI] and a [not AI] tag allows immediate differentiation between a not AI post and a did not tag post.
Reasonable.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
I think tags could be alright but only if this is not allowed, it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
I totally dig what your saying. I’m not a downvoter period. In my short time here at Lemmy, AI assisted projects are going to get shit on one way or another. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. I think the narrative of this thread is to attempt to make things conducive to all users. I personally do not outright reject AI assisted projects. My main concern is if I spin up a container and it turns out to be a doughnut. AI assisted or no, unless you speak multi code languages fluently, you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
There is definitely a trust issue and a need for ways of conveying and building trust in smaller software projects. I think a much better solution there would be discussions about the code and how it works that aren’t hostile interrogations with foregone conclusions in pursuit of a broader anti-AI agenda. If someone just put a lot of effort into making something the details of that process should be on their mind, it should be possible to make them more accessible to people and convey that there is non-artificial understanding behind the project. Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
You’re preaching to the choir but I will give an amen.
the only way they could prevent that was to mandate that disclosure had to be in the post body somewhere and not the title, that way it only appears once someone opens the post. Mostly because some posts are visible from feeds other than subscribed which means that members would see it that are outside of the normal/average visitors here.
Honestly I think i would prefer that. Instead of requiring a tag, require AI disclosure on the project somewhere in the post body.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
good lord, who does this? why waste the thumb energy? seems like a dick move… it’s easier to do no harm. crappy posts will die by themselves.
Again, I dig what you are saying, and I have a similar mind set. However, there is a strong faction of very vocal anti-AI anything, here at Lemmy. Both sides of the argument about AI coded projects or AI in general do have some valid points. However, in my estimation, and as I’ve said before, it’s 2026 and AI is here to stay. It is a good assumption that any project within the last 5 years or so has been at least AI assisted, if not outright vibe coded. Even updates to long standing projects now have AI involvement.
Yes, to me, the option to exercise your mouse wheel to glide over posts you are uninterested in, seems very obvious.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
Honestly. I was fully on board with this until you brought that up. Yea that just 180’d my opinion on if it should be tagged significantly.
I don’t want something to be tagged to be able to allow people to mass downvote it or hide it from sight, that’s not productive to anyone. I wanted the tag to be able to filter it out when I didn’t want to see it, but be able to see it if I felt I wanted to. Allowing for mass downvote on it will significantly hinder that.
I don’t want something to be tagged to be able to allow people to mass downvote
I commiserate, but they are going to get downvoted one way or another
Yea but a tag system will allow it to be seen from outside the community. a general requirement in the body of the post of disclosing if AI was used and how I think would go a long way better in the long run, and requires the person to have entered the post and read it first.
I think I’m leaning more towards that style instead. if something interests me I can join it read it and if its AI and I don’t want to see it I can go elsewhere, that requires people to put bare amount of effort instead of just seeing a [AI] tag from all[/active/hot] (idk what the actual lemmy endpoint is I use tess) and being like “oh ai downvote”
I get what you are saying. The downvoting doesn’t bother me a bit. You can downvote me in to the stone age and I wouldn’t give a shit. The curb stomping, anger, and animosity directed at anything AI tho, I think is out of hand. Every forum I’ve ever been in has a Rule 1. Few live up to that creed. I don’t say this from any moral high ground or superiority whatsoever, but I find it a character flaw not to be able to control yourself as an adult and think ‘Yeah I’m staunchly anti-AI. I have very, very strong opinions of it’s usage in any circumstance. However, there are 8.4 billion other people who might not share my disgust with AI so I’ll just skip on to the next thread.’ Agree to disagree in other words.
A mandatory [AI] tag? Sure.
A [NOT AI] tag? No, that’s the default. Why normalise AI bullshit even further?
But mandating [NOT AI] means that people have to go out of their way to declare their work is AI-free. It requires active lying rather than lying by omission—I think there are a non-zero number of people who would be inclined to omit an AI tag but would not want to go as far as explicitly lying about their work being AI-free.
Agreed. “Failed to disclose” isn’t condemned as harshly as “Blatantly lied”, even if it should be. So obfuscating a project’s AI usage may be seen as less risky than being upfront about it.
A responsibly transparent project should advertise itself as AI-free if it truly is.
Yes, please. I don’t like seeing a “neat handy application” only to find that 95% of it was coded by Claude, the fact of which is either buried, or not even mentioned until you visit the repo and see that it’s the top contributor.
Generally accompanied by crickets to questions a out the project and on some cases some large list of vulnerabilities on some projects that got popular enough.
I feel like this could lead to discrimination and prejudice against ai users. It should have been implemented years ago.
To clarify…you’re in favour of discrimination and prejudice against ai users?
Yes. They should be told to sit in the corner with a big cone shaped hat on like the old days.
I am as well.
Why’s that?
No tag for not AI.
Only AI tags needed, which helps remind people that slop should be warned against. We don’t need to warn for slop free apps
But wouldn’t that be far more useful? Many people seem to be looking for projects who don’t ever touch AI. Devs who use a [No AI] tag show that they follow the same agenda and most likely will not change their opinion on the next release.
No, because the absence of the tag indicates it’s free of AI
Or that the author didn’t know about the rule?
That’s why we have mods
Or…we could make it easier for them and make the use of the tag a conscious decision indicating something instead of relying on the mod’s voluntary work to correct for an implied meaning.
We could make it easier for mods by reporting articles to the mod.
Even better: We could mandate every post to put [Moderate This] at the end if they don’t follow the rules.
Just ban AI already
This is a better plan.
Either ban vibe coded projects entirely or ban vibe coded projects that have less than a year of history. If allowing “mature” vibe coded projects, require the tag.
Spaces like this become so much worse when “i made this last week look at the shiny ui 🎉🎉🎉🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀” projects that will never ever see any form of maintenance are allowed.
This is a rule that could actually be implemented and would help with the slop vs not-slop judgement call
What does it mean for a project to deserve the [AI] tag? This matters, because you may have a lot of projects where a developer may think “no” and someone else thinks “yes”. Some examples from my day job:
- Developer used AI to understand part of the codebase and suggest ways to accomplish goal. Developer incorporated that suggestion, though using their own knowledge deviated from AI’s suggestion in parts. Developer wrote the code themselves. Is this project [AI] or [NOT AI]?
- Developer used AI to review existing (human-written) code for quality and security purposes. AI noticed some issues and proposed fixes. Developer reviewed and accepted them. Is this project [AI]?
- Developer knew they wanted to implement a feature, and while implementing it there was a boilerplate function. Developer asked AI to write this function, manually reviewed it, confirmed it worked, and added it to the codebase. Is this project [AI]?
In these examples the developer carefully reviews the AI’s output, which I think distinguishes it from vibe-coded slop, which at least is what I want to ignore.
It’s also worth noting that an open-source project may receive and incorporate a well-written contribution where the human developer used AI carefully like this. Unless they disclosed that they used AI, it may be unknowable to the project maintainers whether their project is [AI] or not, depending on how you define it. What tag should these projects use?
Sir, this is Lemmy. If you use AI in any way, you are clearly in league with the devil and deserve to burn.
I agree with all your points, BTW.
I posted this discussion because I wanted to explore both guard rails AND nuance around that sort of work flow, particularly for our new mod (and in light of several other scattered convos).
A lot of the diffuse FuckAI Lemmy crowd have poor understanding of code workflow. “AI bad” knee jerks so hard it’s going to dislocate something.
I’ve tried to argue this point, because roughly… ooh…100% of code gen touches AI something. So, do we tag everything?
What people really want is a [SLOP] tag, which is both lazy / not doing your own due diligence and impossible to implement.
In hindsight, I think the pragmatic approach is ultimately the workable (albeit blunted) one. Have the ai tag. It flattens everything but if stops brigading and slop, that’s the least amount of moderation work.
I appreciate you posting btw.
Sir, this is Lemmy. If you use AI in any way, you are clearly in league with the devil and deserve to burn.
Bahahahahahaha!
Yes. Anything made, posted, modified, or output by AI should be tagged as such, always, without exception.
Including immich, home assistant, syncthing, docker…
Right? Right?
https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/
Yes.
Yes.
Having the tags? Sure.
Making them mandatory? Only if we have 1.- an actual process to determine whether a tag is incorrectly applied (up to a respectable level of confidence) and 2.- an adequate, *enforceable+ punishment for infringers.
Absolutely.
I think that unless you have some way to enforce accuracy, it’s meaningless and AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.
An AI bot operator isn’t going to tag their material as [AI], more likely than not they’d attempt to use [NOT AI].
I’d also point out that while lemmy doesn’t (yet) support hashtags, any “tagging” would probably benefit from using the existing method using a #tag.
Ultimately, you need to ask yourself, is undeclared AI that goes undetected by the community a problem, or the new “normal”?
I’ll note that I’m not a proponent of Assumed Intelligence and think that when the bubble bursts we’re going to be in a world of hurt, but with a little luck the billionaires will have lost their shirts in the process.
Please do! It’s always my first question when reading new projects.
See, the problem with this is there’s no objective standard for validating whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So we can impose conventions that say you must tag something as being generated in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean that people are going to actually be forthcoming with the community.
This is a problem that we’re going to have to deal with not just when we’re talking about our self hosted builds, but almost anything that is mediated through a screen. So, if we can figure it out for here, I’d suggest that we tell everybody shortly thereafter; about it because it‘ll solve a lot of problems, in a lot of different places.
Bonus points if whatever we come up with can actually be self hosted.
No, because it’s about the what, and with or without AI is the how.
We don’t have disclosures “built on a Linux/Windows/macOS machine” or “built using IntelliJ/Eclipse” so why is it important what tool was used to do something?
Some people have serious ethical and quality concerns about AI usage in code in a way that’s just irrelevant to the OS and IDE used to code it.
I understand that people have concerns, but those concerns are only relevant if they come from a maintainer or repo owner point of view. There is an entire spectrum of how AI is used in code, and it’s not a simple yes or no thing. I am for example completely against vibe coding as it’s just a risk and liability in the long run. However, to use AI to brainstorm, get suggestions, discuss architecture, learn with examples, and assist basically like someone else is sitting next to you while you code yourself… that is something completely different, and results in a completely different outcome.
In the end, it depends on can the person at the steering wheel take full ownership and accountability of the code they produced, with or without AI.
I understand that people have concerns, but those concerns are only relevant if they come from a maintainer or repo owner point of view.
This just isn’t true. Whether I’m a developer or not, I have to deal with the security issues that come with running the code. I have to deal with the bugs that come from it. I have to decide if I’m willing to support practices I may consider unethical used to produce the software, especially if I’m considering donating to the project. I don’t need to be a topic expert to understand that AI code is prone to bugs and security vulnerabilities, nor do I need to be one to consider the massive ecological damage and copyright violation required to train the plagiarism machine.
However, to use AI to brainstorm, get suggestions, discuss architecture, learn with examples, and assist basically like someone else is sitting next to you while you code yourself… that is something completely different, and results in a completely different outcome.
Generally, people take the most issue with using it to actually generate code in any capacity. There are purists who might insist you not even touch AI, but I think most draw the line at including code or graphics not written by a human.
In the end, it depends on can the person at the steering wheel take full ownership and accountability of the code they produced, with or without AI.
If we presume ethically neutral tools, sure, but the massive damage to ecosystems and towns that comes with training, using, and powering AI are seen by many as outweighing the utility they’re able to provide.
You don’t blame the knife when people get stabbed, so why blame AI for code it generated on the developer’s behalf? AI is a tool. Nothing more.
For the other stuff - I can’t take people seriously, because most people pick and choose when it’s convenient to be moral and ethical. Same people who don’t like AI pollution are using cars and plastics in their daily lives and would absolutely flip out if someone would ask them to give it up for the environment. AI is just the current “trend” to hate and be moral about because not many people are depending on it yet in ther day to day life.
You don’t blame the knife when people get stabbed, so why blame AI for code it generated on the developer’s behalf?
Because creating a knife doesn’t require a tens of MW data center that runs on gas turbines, making the surrounding area unlivable with noise pollution. It doesn’t require stealing knowledge from the entire world and then selling us our own knowledge back. It doesn’t help billionaires lay off tens of thousands of us.
can’t take people seriously, because most people pick and choose when it’s convenient to be moral and ethical.
So you’re using other people’s moral flexibility to justify your own rather than taking any sort of stance of your own, cool.
Same people who don’t like AI pollution are using cars and plastics in their daily lives and would absolutely flip out if someone would ask them to give it up for the environment.
Using cars as an example is a bit disingenuous since in the US, at least, huge swathes of the nation are simply not built for pedestrians; buying and maintaining a car is the hidden tax you pay to the auto industry instead of the government. There are plenty of places in the US where it is not safe to bike or walk. Some of us are pissed about it, but what are we supposed to do until infrastructure is massively reworked at exorbitant cost?
AI is just the current “trend” to hate and be moral about because not many people are depending on it yet in ther day to day life.
This is nothing more than an attempt to downplay the issue so you can ignore it.
