Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: by showing avatars of contributors on repository pages, by showing your contributions to your followers via the activity feed and by signalling contributions per day on the activity graph of your profile. Potential hiring managers often take note of this. Recruiters often find and screen candidates this way. If you are a software developer (either existing or aspiring) looking for work, tuning these signals can often work to your advantage.
There should be a button to ban anyone that submits any changes using AI from your projects.
Slopcoders would never be able to strip the included AI tool identifiers so it would likely be one of the most accurate automated ban tools ever made.
I do not at all disagree.
From a technical reason standpoint:
AI/LLMs/ML/Expert System Output, they all require proficiency and understanding by the operating user to actually live up to any potential, debatable or objective.
From a data rights/licensing/sovereignty/FuckTheCorporations Standpoint:
Fuck 'em. Anything that Claude Code/Codex or any other corporate backed proprietary model/inference pipeline produce is sin tainted, and feeds the beast. Ban on principle.
From a social perspective:
The linked article says it all better than I could.
This is all said, as someone who does use open source and privately developed both versions of LLM, ML, and Expert System backed/using/supporting systems.
I’ve scraped zero places I had no right to, and asked permission in several I had licensing rights to, but morality compelled me to not be a shit head human who doesn’t understand the idea of consent regardless.
I’ve provided zero AI driven PRs to anyone, and even though my ass was fired not even a month ago and thrown into the blender of the current US labor environment, my repos are still private, I haven’t tried to sell anyone any bullshit SaaS ideas, and I haven’t tried to have a soulless automaton go roam the Internet for me and insert itself anywhere for the clout that may help get me hired.
It is not that hard to not be a shithead with the technologies, even if that’s what the techbros are marketing it under, and anyone who can’t not be one with them, doesn’t deserve to be welcomed into projects they would need to put some heart into understanding before the idea of automating any portion of them should even be considered.
This is only true of the sort of caliber of mind who thinks clicking ‘pay subscription’ on a tool that parrots the stolen knowledge they wish they had with a fraction of its functional spirit because the mind attempting it cannot direct nor supervise what it cannot understand, equates to having said knowledge at all.
This is admittedly the grand majority of those causing the problems described in the article, but is by no means everyone.
That is not a humble brag of any kind, I really wish more people understood the danger of bad actors being the only ones proficient in the use of “AI tools”.
They are gleefully camouflaged right now, right under the idiots and the hate.
Many of those PRs aren’t clout seeking, they’re sabotage, and some of them are sneaking right by without said AI identifiers in a multitude of critical FOSS projects, because of how easy it is to tell bad AI from human authorship and how hard actual enhanced human authorship is to detect.
Cory’s reverse centaurs don’t all ride for the same side, and this battlefield will need more focus than just stopping Chad from using his credit card to make his LinkedIn and GitHub look good.