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.
While I fully agree with what you’re saying here, and that it should be stated, I personally believe that the only thing he’s done here is said the quiet part out loud.
Like other major projects of are stating that the main reason they don’t do a full AI ban is due to the fact that it’s increasingly difficult to be able to look at someone’s code contributions and say, yes, that’s AI versus that’s a human.
I recently made the swap-off of Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code because I was sick of the degradation in Sublime Text and there wasn’t any decent alternatives with the depreciation of atom a few years back.
I was amazed to find that OOtB visual code has a full on AI assisted coding setup with Ai assisted auto completion and suggestions and even has a chat box to talk with the model of choice. This setup by default doesn’t add any credits or attribution, and while isn’t anywhere near as intequate claude setup by default, it’s still AI assisted writing.
The only thing the public brigades are actually doing is making contributors hide that they are using it, which increases the problem like you mentioned.
A much better solution would be people stepping up to the plate and helping these projects, but it’s far easier to complain. I firmly understand why contributors have resorted to hiding the fact they use it, there’s far too much public outcry without enough support to not on most open sourced or publicly supported projects.
“The only thing the public brigades are actually doing is making contributors hide that they are using it, which increases the problem like you mentioned.”
As things are now, it would be best to eschew the use of LLMs; because LLMs are tainted with the dark, ignoble goals of Big Tech. In order to stop Big Tech’s plan, we need to object, reject, and force LLMs to become a money drain. Dropping LLMs would only help to burst this cursed bubble that techbros are desperately trying to keep inflated.
“A much better solution would be people stepping up to the plate and helping these projects, but it’s far easier to complain. I firmly understand why contributors have resorted to hiding the fact they use it, there’s far too much public outcry without enough support to not on most open sourced or publicly supported projects.“
If people are outright rejecting LLMs, it is better to drop these tools instead of embracing these things and using them in secret. Part of my drive to learn how to program is contributing to open source projects, but, the fact some of them embrace the use of LLMs to develop puts me off. However, despite this, learning to code and to contribute is of the utmost importance in order to help preserve the integrity of open source projects.
The things that are falsely called “AI” is a demotivating factor, as people start to feel the futility of learning if a thing that cannot think or feel might trump them and be used instead of them having a job in tech. It is going to create a brain drain event, because if there is not enough fresh blood staying interested in a field like programming and software dev…That will damage a lot of open source projects, and even the Linux Kernel. People age out and when those old heads die, all that institutional knowledge will go with them. As very few people will be able to carry the torch and that essential knowledge for the next generation. Big Tech doesn’t understand the full impact of their actions…They are greedy, disruptive fucks.