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.
Having both an [AI] and a [not AI] tag allows immediate differentiation between a not AI post and a did not tag post.
Reasonable.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
I think tags could be alright but only if this is not allowed, it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
I totally dig what your saying. I’m not a downvoter period. In my short time here at Lemmy, AI assisted projects are going to get shit on one way or another. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. I think the narrative of this thread is to attempt to make things conducive to all users. I personally do not outright reject AI assisted projects. My main concern is if I spin up a container and it turns out to be a doughnut. AI assisted or no, unless you speak multi code languages fluently, you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
There is definitely a trust issue and a need for ways of conveying and building trust in smaller software projects. I think a much better solution there would be discussions about the code and how it works that aren’t hostile interrogations with foregone conclusions in pursuit of a broader anti-AI agenda. If someone just put a lot of effort into making something the details of that process should be on their mind, it should be possible to make them more accessible to people and convey that there is non-artificial understanding behind the project. Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
You’re preaching to the choir but I will give an amen.
the only way they could prevent that was to mandate that disclosure had to be in the post body somewhere and not the title, that way it only appears once someone opens the post. Mostly because some posts are visible from feeds other than subscribed which means that members would see it that are outside of the normal/average visitors here.
Honestly I think i would prefer that. Instead of requiring a tag, require AI disclosure on the project somewhere in the post body.
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.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
Honestly. I was fully on board with this until you brought that up. Yea that just 180’d my opinion on if it should be tagged significantly.
I don’t want something to be tagged to be able to allow people to mass downvote it or hide it from sight, that’s not productive to anyone. I wanted the tag to be able to filter it out when I didn’t want to see it, but be able to see it if I felt I wanted to. Allowing for mass downvote on it will significantly hinder that.
I don’t want something to be tagged to be able to allow people to mass downvote
I commiserate, but they are going to get downvoted one way or another
Yea but a tag system will allow it to be seen from outside the community. a general requirement in the body of the post of disclosing if AI was used and how I think would go a long way better in the long run, and requires the person to have entered the post and read it first.
I think I’m leaning more towards that style instead. if something interests me I can join it read it and if its AI and I don’t want to see it I can go elsewhere, that requires people to put bare amount of effort instead of just seeing a [AI] tag from all[/active/hot] (idk what the actual lemmy endpoint is I use tess) and being like “oh ai downvote”
I get what you are saying. The downvoting doesn’t bother me a bit. You can downvote me in to the stone age and I wouldn’t give a shit. The curb stomping, anger, and animosity directed at anything AI tho, I think is out of hand. Every forum I’ve ever been in has a Rule 1. Few live up to that creed. I don’t say this from any moral high ground or superiority whatsoever, but I find it a character flaw not to be able to control yourself as an adult and think ‘Yeah I’m staunchly anti-AI. I have very, very strong opinions of it’s usage in any circumstance. However, there are 8.4 billion other people who might not share my disgust with AI so I’ll just skip on to the next thread.’ Agree to disagree in other words.
A mandatory [AI] tag? Sure.
A [NOT AI] tag? No, that’s the default. Why normalise AI bullshit even further?
But mandating [NOT AI] means that people have to go out of their way to declare their work is AI-free. It requires active lying rather than lying by omission—I think there are a non-zero number of people who would be inclined to omit an AI tag but would not want to go as far as explicitly lying about their work being AI-free.
Agreed. “Failed to disclose” isn’t condemned as harshly as “Blatantly lied”, even if it should be. So obfuscating a project’s AI usage may be seen as less risky than being upfront about it.
A responsibly transparent project should advertise itself as AI-free if it truly is.
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.
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
But wouldn’t that be far more useful? Many people seem to be looking for projects who don’t ever touch AI. Devs who use a [No AI] tag show that they follow the same agenda and most likely will not change their opinion on the next release.
No, because the absence of the tag indicates it’s free of AI
Or that the author didn’t know about the rule?
That’s why we have mods
Or…we could make it easier for them and make the use of the tag a conscious decision indicating something instead of relying on the mod’s voluntary work to correct for an implied meaning.
We could make it easier for mods by reporting articles to the mod.
Even better: We could mandate every post to put [Moderate This] at the end if they don’t follow the rules.
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?
Just ban AI already
This is a better plan.
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!
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
Absolutely.
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 the reality is that people will downvote the AI posts, and that will incentivise people to not disclose it or outright lie. The other thing that came to mind here is the fact that I’ve been trying to set my RSS reader up to not show me anything if AI is mentioned. It turns out that I haven’t been able to do that because it couldn’t discern “AI” from “fair”, “pair”, “air” etc. but the sentiment was there because I’m sick of hearing about it, and I imagine a lot of people are. This could cause readers or whatever else is configured to block AI content to block the non-ai content too, just because it’s mentioned. Additionally it does bring AI to the forefront, which doesn’t help with that AI fatigue.
Hmm, can I RegEx this?
[\s-]AI[-,\.\s]This is assuming it’s not at the start of the article.
EDIT: Thinking about it 2 more seconds, this might actually be more precise:
[\W_]AI[\W_]Doing more, like
\WAIwould filter words like “ailment”. Haven’t found a word matchingAI\Wyet, but I’m careful atm.It won’t work. You need a text classifier to do sentiment analysis, because “ai” is a concept, not just “ai”. TinyBERT or MiniLM I reckon could do it or if you really want to cut off your nose to spite your face, code the equivalent in python from scratch.
Say what you want about M$, but TinyBERT / MiniLM are awesome.
Smart play would be for the RSS reader to have that as optional plug in module, IMHO.
You know, now you mention it, I haven’t tested to see if the filter functionality of my reader will accept a regular expression. I’ll give it a go later, thanks!
Ironically…ai is probably an excellent tool to prefetch your content, perform sentiment analysis and then sanitise the content to your liking.
😂 yes indeed!
Me: I’m sick of hearing about AI. It’s very existence brings me down. It’s bad for the environment, bad for code, bad for mental illness, bad for humans.
AI: Sorry to interrupt, but have you considered using AI to help with this matter?
Legitimately, I agree it would be a good use, but I will be sticking with non-AI solutions regardless.
Hey, even Che Guvera wore a Rolex. :)
PS: I think you’re circling something though - people are objecting to the idea of what they think AI is, based on emotional appeal. It’s a category error.
As in - you know damn well that the correct tool for sentiment analysis is an AI but you’d rather avoid using it because … whatever.
It’s that “because whatever” I’m pointing at, because right now it’s unexamined and at best scores you a pyrrhic victory. Sentence transformers, rankers and re-rankers are AI, the right tool for the job and you won’t use them because… Ai bad.
(You in the general sense, not you you).
Because use of AI is bad for me. YMMV.
I’m midly curious as to how.
How would (say) you using Qwen 3.5 4B be bad for you (specifically) in this case?
Qwen’s open weights, already trained, runs locally on your rig, doesn’t leak PII to the cloud and does the job.
Surely if AI discussion in feeds is causing grief, anything that removes that for you (your stated intention) is “good” for you?
I find that whenever I have used AI to find a solution, I have forfeited learning, so I avoid it completely so that I can learn about the thing that AI would have otherwise shortcut for me. Regarding this specific example, while it may or may not be the case that AI is the best tool for sentiment analysis, it’s not the best or most efficient tool for keyword filtering, and keyword filtering is all I’d really need. In the event that I cared enough about the filtering to find or build a solution, it wouldn’t be with AI for this reason, but also because of the aforementioned reasons. Even if they’re not applicable to this very scenario, I’d rather not involve myself in the technology at all if I can help it.
Can we talk shop? I don’t want to come across as badgering you if you’re happy to put a pin in it, but I think this is a bad take. Like, if you’re going to try and solve this with Regex soup and spite, it’s going to hurt.
What happens if Codex, Claude, Cursor, LLM or phrases like “machine learning”, “generative ai” etc are mentioned?
Or when someone wants to have a discussion like this?
\bAI\b will miss almost all of it.
Note: I have no stake in you using or not using AI, an I am not trying to convert you to the church of Latter day Aiology. I am simply trying to [
]avoid doing real work[] chat.
“Small,” non-generative, BERT-like models, would probably be more appropriate.
Anthropic does sentiment analysis with regex in Claude Code though ¯\(ツ)/¯
Please do! It’s always my first question when reading new projects.
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.
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!
Yes please.