A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
It wouldn’t be such a big deal if you weren’t facing immense harassment for using these tools. I don’t blame him for saying fuck it. If the code works, and has been reviewed/modified/approved by a human, then who cares.
I care. GenAI and AI bullshit is general is a massive ethical, environmental, and socio-economic mine field.
The way it’s been developed, I’d call it more a superfund site.
Simply accepting the use of LLM tools is going to send the incorrect message, as that can be masked as approval. It will make techbros that peddle slopware bolder, however, I don’t condone harassment (be loud, clear, and don’t harass). It does matter because again, transparency is key and that builds trust in open source projects. You might not care, but there are a lot of people that feel integrity in the code base matters as you are running that shit on your machine if you install it. To hide the sources of code, that is closed source behavior, and we cannot even properly evaluate a lot of the code they sling.
I dunno if anyone has a right to be talking about “integrity of their machine” when that machine was built using slave labor and mining processes that heavily pollute poor countries.
One fellow internet user, I specifically mentioned, “integrity in the code base matters as you are running that shit on your machine if you install it”, not “integrity of their machine”. Two, I’m going to be real with you, while you are highlighting a very real concern…You are trying to distract from the harm that LLMs and how their usage in programming can break the integrity of code bases.
The rush to develop LLMs, the data centers that will fuel this boom, and the components used to create computational power…Is just as damaging to poor countries that have rich mineral resources, leading to heavy pollution due to high demand for those resources.
This whole push for LLM development is best summarized by iamthetot, who also replied to wagesj45, “I care. GenAI and AI bullshit in general is a massive ethical, environmental, and socio-economic mine field.”