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.
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.
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 absolutely don’t want Meta Tags in every titles. It makes reading the list of posts super annoying.
I also don’t feel the need to know whether there’s some AI commits, but I do want to know if a project is largely vibe coded. I don’t have an objective metric on where this line could be drawn.
I think the status quo is kinda fine. Some commenter will point it out and will get enough upvotes to be visible on first glance. It’s not perfect but good enough for me.
I find myself commenting three questions on any post about a new application somebody developed.
- What is your experience in [subject matter of app]?
- What is your experience in software development?
- What percentage of the code for this app was written by AI? What percent was written by you?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind if all new app posts were required to answer these questions for their post. It doesn’t discriminate, it just asks them to lay their cards on the table for everyone to see. The community can judge from there.
Some commenter will point it out and will get enough upvotes to be visible on first glance. It’s not perfect but good enough for me.
I don’t necessarily disagree here, however there is always the edge case of a certain overly-vocal group being 100% anti-AI, and that any usage of AI is considered a crime against humanity.
I’m not part of that group per se, but I also want full disclosure. If you used AI to get things going and handled it yourself from there, that’s one thing. Constant commits from Claude or whatever is a whole different bucket of shit I refuse to touch.
Yes, the crowd will point it out if the author didn’t and you can decide what to make of it. It’s probably discouraging to post slopware if you know you’re in for a lot of criticism, I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than being forced to flag it [AI].
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
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?
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!
@festus @selfhosted Excellent examples. What the tag [AI] conveys is not what you really need to know, which is the quality of the code (component/unit), unit testing, and so forth. I assume there is some acceptance testing done at the project level. The human who submits the code must understand that flaws in their code is their responsibility, just as those who contribute/maintain the project are responsible at the system level. It is both an objective and reputational process. Does it really matter what tools are used if the work product passes the test, verification and validation criteria? Sloppy code is not unique to AI tools.
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.
Absolutely.
Please do! It’s always my first question when reading new projects.
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.
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.
AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.
It depends.
There are a variety of indicators, some blatant like .cursorrules or CLAUDE.md and some key phrases that can be searched for. Unless they are actively working to hide references, these turn up in the overwhelming majority of the “not admitting but not denying” camp, or the just complete lack of disclosure.
There are also pretty solid indicators with commit logs that can be seen that are… unlikely to ever be a person.
What is getting harder is around the syntax detection tools and fragment detection tools. Some straight up rips from multiple codebases used to be obvious, but some tools are better at refactoring to make that discovery harder too.
Just to be candid, I am in no way anti-AI, I run and train my own models at home on my own hardware. Its a tool - a hammer is great for nailing a board to a wall, and an absolutely wrong choice for trying to screw together a cabinet, and I consider LLMs in the same camp.
If you’re trying to vibe code a full project, its probably going to be a massive problem. If you’re using it to parse some swagger and generate some hooks based on a prefix you defined for specific types without wanting to bother with smashing a script for the disparate types that can be easily detected with an llm… well, you’re probably using it in a way I’d agree with.
Someone did mention an automod disclosure comment, which I really like the idea of, but would need to look into for use on the fediverse, I’m really not sure how good the automods out there are these days. Last time I checked they were… not so great.
I think this is a major over generalisation that misses the main point of why people don’t want AI projects. The real questions are:
- Is this slop?
- Does a human understand all of this code?
- Did a human design this deliberately or is it completely derivative and uninspired?
- Will a human take responsibility for bugs that come up?
- Did a human write the docs?
- Will this be maintained or just a weekend project with no substance?
- Does this actually serve a purpose?
Idk how to address these things really. I could see the AI tag going both ways, but I do think it’s painting with too broad a brush.
I’m in the process of launching a new business as a single dev, and I want to be upfront about my use of AI, but I notice as soon as I mention any LLM, most people assume what I’ve built is “vibe coded” without even looking at the applications themselves.
I spent almost two months just setting up the devops side of things before I even considered publishing. Feedback buttons in the apps automatically open issues on my Forgejo, push mirrors to GitHub and Codeberg, and I do weekly progress reports internally (I stopped posting to Lemmy after people felt spammed and now I just post on the site blog)
I’m just not sure how to make it easy to tell that I’m actually putting my heart and soul into building software that should help people.
If curious: https://circuitforge.tech/
I looked at your site. Realistically I think we’re talking about two different things here. There are tools which were programmed with the assistance of AI and then there are AI powered tools. Your stuff is clearly the latter.
I think ai powered tools are a lot harder to sell people on right now. The ai powered area is where I see by far the most shovelware/slop.
To be blunt, when I see a new ai powered tool I assume several things:
- This is low effort slop
- A tech bro vibe coded this 100%
- No one cares about this
- It will either make a ton of money or be abandoned next week
- If it’s popular, anthropic will buy/clone it and everyone will use their version instead
I know this isn’t true of every ai powered app but it’s true of 99% of them right now. I really have no idea how you could convince people yours isnt slop.
One idea might be to stop using the term “AI”. It’s a buzzword with strong connotations. Some people hear it and think “gold rush”, some people think “slop” or “data center”.
Personally I would be a lot more likely to take a project seriously if they used the term “LLM” or “machine learning” to describe what powers the product.
Also, I don’t see anything that looks like obvious AI art to me but DONT USE AI ART. AI art is already terrible on its own but when I see AI art mixed with AI text telling me about an AI powered app I’m 1000% done giving my attention.
For sure on the art. I’m a graphic artist by education and I’m already working with another full-time artist on the application logos. When I make enough I’m planning to hire a proper web developer for the frontend/web design as that’s onc area I do lean pretty heavy on the LLM’s for assistance.
Funny you should mention the AI vs LLM labeling as I much prefer to call them LLM’s or “models”, but I’m trying to keep it accessible for non-technical people. I think I’ll go back through and rename though.
Also most of the tools are deterministic, with the LLM’s filling in gaps where there needs to be some amount of probabilistic interaction, like figuring out what you could cook given only the ingredients in your pantry, or rewriting a resume 26 million ways to satisfy the ATS filters.
If you don’t want to use those features, nothing forcing you. They’re useful for tracking and organizing without the LLM at all.
Yeah… Normies for sure don’t use the term “LLM”. I don’t think it would scare them though. They’re used to being confused 💀
When I see “AI” I think “tech bro hype” whereas “LLM” makes me think the developer is more likely to have a realistic view of the technology.
I guess this depends a lot on your target demo. But but even just cutting down on usage of the exact term “AI” would help I think. Basically anything is better.
Much participated on the advice!
Or you don’t allow AI
I hate it when the default state is turned into the negative. Every time I have to specify “unsweet tea” I feel the sands of my lifeforce slipping away.
