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.
What you’re taking issue with though is deeper than ai. It’s online discourse that is so rude and nuance-less.
In any case, this thread is full of people saying things like “that’s his right to do this but he communicated poorly about this” and getting piles of upvotes. So, yes ai is very polarizing in this corner of the Internet, but I think it’s much more at issue here that people don’t like his handling of it. I know that personally if it weren’t for that I probably would’ve thought “hmm sounds sketchy to use ai in a product thousands of people depend on” and kept scrolling. But no, he was a dick about it and is now hiding his use of ai moving forward. So the people who hate AI are extra pissed about it. Likely because they fear others will follow that lead and enshittify the software they currently enjoy.
I guess that’s a fair assessment. It’s just recently quite annoying that we have tons of AI-hate, age-restriction-FUD, etc., while at the same time war rages, the economy goes to shit, and more and more governments turn right-wing or outright fascist.
We have so many problems, yet we rip each others throat out for topics that are ultimately irrelevant.
I am with you that his last sentence was completely stupid. I am not with you regarding the “hiding” part. I was actually surprised there even were commits marked by claude. The way I use agents is typically completely local, then I review each diff, adjust as necessary and then commit. The commit is then obviously by me; not claude or whatever agent I am using at the time. I am pretty sure a lot of people work that way. So I actually think the default is to not see the involvement of AI. And I don’t do this to hide anything … that’s just a consequence of the workflow and how git works and I didn’t even consider that this should be done any differently.
That’s why I also understand his point - that he shouldn’t have said so bluntly: if that marker was never there, probably no one would have noticed to begin with.
My understanding is that this dude was letting Claude fully author features/bugfixes. At least that would be the only way I can understand commits being credited to Claude. I am sure that is a default setting meant to encourage transparency. Him removing Claude as author on work that is already done is childish (as was his remark about it) and intentionally deceptive. If he was doing what you said you do, I think the attitude would be vague grumpiness but it’s objectively not a big deal because not only does it suggest more oversight, there would’ve been no opportunity for him to remove the author and then act like an ass about it.
I agree with you generally about people being shitty online. I have been treated very poorly for suggesting objectivity when it comes to ai specifically. But in this case I mostly get why people are upset. And again, it does bear repeating, this thread has many level headed comments about this and I didn’t see any negative responses to those. It may not be fair to you, but I think the reason you got the pushback you did is because you seemed fully on the guy’s side. Yeah, unfortunately the binary thinking that goes on has no patience for views that come across that way.