I honestly do not understand why anyone would ever for any reason submit AI-generated code to any FOSS project.
What’s the motivation behind that kind of behavior? What do people get out of it?
makes a little green box on their github activity chart that they can show to a potential employer
It’s so upsetting to me that tech workers are expected to live and breathe coding. You’re responsible for upskilling on your own time and being up to date on a whole host of someone’s pet interests that have nothing to actually do with your job. I think it really contributes to the escape to do woodworking trope. It’s not GitHub’s fault, but I still regret falling for the hype.
Move Godot to codeberg. Github is too popular. It’s where all the fool kids go and link their LinkedIn to. It’s Microslop all the way down. It’s highly likely the number of real contributors will be higher on Codeberg than Github.
Also, doesn’t github have a viebcoding platform built into it making it really easy to create AI slop?
Edit: yep they do! Get the fuck off of github!
Gentoo would agree.
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. But moving to a less popular platform could run the risk of alienating legitimate contributors.
The article does indeed continue 😮 There are so many full page interruptions,I thought the end had been reached.
Good to know that they are considering moving away from Microslop. It’s about damn time. As the article insinuates, there is little hope of Microslop turning down the dial on AI. They will create AI problems and sell AI solutions for those problems.
They should close PRs to the public and only accept then from contributors who apply to be vetted.
It sucks, but that’s really the only good way to prevent spam.
Or Captcha’d PRs.
AI is quite good at solving captchas; better than many humans. And it doesn’t really slow down the sloppers for them to set their machine running, come back in an hour and then solve a puzzle manually to submit it. Couple of minutes of work every day and they can still drown the world in bullshit.
Something needs to change, but I’m not convinced that would be enough…
Which AI poisoned captchas?
'cause hallucinogenic ones seem pretty effective deterrent.
Seems like a natural next step is some kinda reputation system for a project’s contributors. If you’ve written 50 successfully merged PRs, you’re certainly less likely to make trash in any method. Create a mentorship heirarchy. It sounds very helpful no matter what. Then the people who have merged 0 PRs to the project will likely work harder too, since they know they will be at the most scrutiny
Its trivial for ai to successfully merge 50 prs into the projects of other ai.
It be frustrating for a beginner that every time they try to contribute they are ignored because they have yet to contribute.
When the topic of AI submissions flooding open source projects pops up, my immediate reaction is to think "see, this is why you disregard intentions". Because I genuinely believe a lot of the people submitting this slop are trying to help the project, even if in reality they’re harming it, by wasting the maintainers’ time with their crap.They cause harm and deserve to be treated as a source of harm, simple as.
And while most projects could/should use more money, I don’t think that’s the solution; it allows the devs to handle more workload, sure, but the goal should be to reduce it. I think this will be eventually done through pre-sorting contributors: a cathedral for the outsiders, but a bazaar for the insiders.
I don’t think anyone using AI for this has good intentions. They are trying to increase their own “reputation” without putting in the work. If they are in the field they should know that someone has to review this. If they can’t be bothered to do that then they know they are making someone else do this unpaid labor without having even checked it first. If they are not in the field then they think spending money on their own pet project is the best way to support instead of giving money directly to the team doing the actual work. If the team wanted to use that money on AI they could then do so themselves. It’s a self interested thing either way.
Most of the people using AI to contribute are probably like the guy who got so upset his pet AI wasn’t allowed to contribute he likely promoted it to write a hit piece on the person who rejected it. Just narcissistic people who wish they were better than they are and wasting time and resources hoping to feel better about themselves and their contributions.
I think intentions are a spook created by the bourgeois to control us, and I wrote an article on My blog about it https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/8-deeper-levels-to-understand-accidents-and-intentions-308c7dc9b742
There’s a lot in Your article I agree with. A lot. I could nitpick some of the middle layers, but the conclusion is the same — we should simply disregard intentions, when judging the morality of the actions of someone (incl. ourselves).
Specially the 7th layer — what You said there is something that has been living in my mind for a long time, but I was never able to phrase it properly.
About the 8th layer: the bourgeoisie does love to exploit this problem when it helps them to get less blame, since it’s impossible to prove someone doesn’t have good intentions. But I don’t think they created it, I think the problem is older even than our own species, and it comes from developing a theory of mind.
Thank You for sharing it!
In the spirit of level 7: I use capitalised pronouns in all three grammatical persons
I don’t think the Bourgeois created intentionalism, but I do think they’re responsible for its prevalence in our modern society. The degree to which most people are concerned with intentions is so stifling, unhealthy, and unsustainable that I do not believe it can be natural. We live in an age of relatively little social upheaval. There are fewer revolutions and wars than usual right now, and that’s not entirely a good thing. Look at the USA - they are in desperate need of a civil war, or we shall soon be fighting world war 3. Yet the people are far more passive than we would expect from history. Nonviolent resistance is also down, so it’s not just military technology. It’s propaganda.
I think intentionalism is a meme - an idea that through natural selection has taken on a life of its own. And because it helps the Bourgeoisie, they, perhaps unconsciously, create conditions that favour it in their media empires.
Pronouns fixed! (I hope. Let me know if I fucked it up. Also, just to be sure: You’re okay with indeterminate “you” being still in minuscules, right? As in, only capitalising it for the personal pronoun?)
I don’t have data to decide between my hypothesis (biological phenomenon) versus Yours (meme). And it’s possible it’s both things at the same time. So I think I’ll roll with the idea of it being a meme.
Perhaps what the bourgeoisie is selecting for isn’t intentionalism itself, but “assumptiveness”? I’ve been noticing people are becoming increasingly eager to voice certainty based on little to nothing; “what’s inside someone else’s head” is just a consequence of that. For the bourgeoisie, this would be useful for a lot more things, for example it makes people more vulnerable against advertisement.
On USA, another factor is false consciousness. (I know You aren’t Marxist, but I think the concept is useful to Anarchists too.) The United-Statian population sees itself as part of the “ruling caste”, as opposed to “the brown people” (…like me), and in the process they subject themselves even more to the actual ruling elites there.
You know, I don’t think the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” thing is true anymore. It made sense back in the 70s when the USA had what the capitalists call a middle class, but that group is getting smaller and smaller. Wealth inequality is higher than it’s ever been in history, according to some measures. Maybe I’m just not in touch with the youth anymore, but everyone I know treats “Sigma male grindset” as a joke and knows our generation is never buying houses.
Then again I’ve lived in a homeless shelter and surround Myself with antirealists, so what do I know about the consciousness of white suburbia?
“you” as the pronoun for hypothetical people is perfectly amenable to Me. However I know other capitalised pronoun users, and the risk of misunderstandings and the annoyance of clarification has lead Me to use “one” as the hypothetical pronoun instead in most cases, and thus I recommend it to make your life easier as well.
I confess I don’t fully understand how increased assumptiveness should lead to an increased value placed on intentions as excuses for wrongdoing.
I wonder if the influx of slop contributions can be stemmed by a legal document that makes the contributor legally liable for their submission.
Seems like lawyers have been learning the hard way to be accountable for their slop, perhaps these lessons can be leveraged in the open source community.
Legally liable for what? Just being bad code? How are you going to enforce that against some kid in another country?
It’s time to start putting maintainers’ attention behind a paywall. $50 refundable deposit to submit a PR, forfeited if it’s obvious AI slop
Real “these kids would be very upset if they could read” situation. Who bothers to pick through the whole EULA before submitting?
Like any open source mass contribution project that’s gained too much popularity, you need extra firebreaks in between the Open Submission and Final Product.
That means adding manpower to submission review, QA, etc, which public projects don’t often have.
Sort of the Achilles Heel of the open source community. AI is just making the vulnerability extra glaring.
That would be a closing a gate after the horses have escaped situation.
Letting unverifiable code in would damage to developers and users that wouldn’t be easy to disentangle and erode trust in the product, killing it.
Mitchell Hashimoto is trying to build a reputation system to combat this https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
vibeCoding–
FashSlop*
