Yup, I’m posting another this week. Sorry.
This week I’m hoping we can wrangle a solution around AI and our selfhosted community. There are plenty of strong opinions (both pro and con), but one thing is for certain - there needs to be better disclosure in promo posts. Two options (that aren’t mutually exclusive):
- Any posts of an AI focused, AI Developed, etc software gets an [AI] tag. No, a [Not-AI] tag is not needed to accomplish this, thats kind of a “non-golfer” sort of tag.
- Comment requiring an AI disclosure response to every promo post, if its not detailed in the post itself. Specifics (generating docs for commands, translation, whole-boat vibe-coded this app, etc) would be requested.
I will say that having disclosure and/or tagging would mean that comments that just say “slop” or “fuck ai” or whatever would be off topic at that point, that information is already provided, so its just noise (and sometimes pretty uncivil - I’ve been light on that for now due to the need for a rule on this).
The tag [AI] would make it easy to filter out (or search for, if that’s your thing), but there is a wildly different degree of AI use out there, and from the posts with a positive score, its usually due to responsible AI use (translations, a snippet they had to do something obscure with, available to use with AI but doesn’t require it, whatever), which is why I think the disclosure has a place as a benefit to everyone.
Please provide any input or alternative options on this, and I can then put it to a vote like the last one. Comments seem to be the best approach without involving something off-site, but if you have a better idea/option, please share.
+1
Home-AI oriented channels like Reddit’s localllama are filled with self promotion garbage, and more will trickle here over time… I’m not even against self promo or heavy coding assistance, but 9-times-out-of-10, the linked repo is nonsense, or straight-up fraudulent. And being obviously vibe-coded is a common tell.
Good to get ahead of this.
Also, +1 on supressing driveby insults. If the post is tagged up front, there’s no need. That being said, it should be okay for users to call out an obvious grift, or a “nonsense repo” that’s actually pure slop.
That being said, it should be okay for users to call out an obvious grift, or a “nonsense repo” that’s actually pure slop.
Especially if the disclosure is blatantly a lie, absolutely. I’d also say if you see any indicators that they are lying in the disclosure, its still worthy of reporting - but I would say report and separately message the “why”, to limit visibility of seeing those indicators.
This sounds like a review / gating problem. Getting people to self filter / self gate is never going to work, and if it does it will work probably on the wrong people.
I don’t have a problem with AI. I have a problem with vibe-coded apps released as a one-shot and then never maintained or supported. That’s slop.
I also have a problem with the trace apps (lifttrace, nutritrace, etc.) because while they’re entirely vibe-coded, they are actively developed, but they’re posted here by a brand promotion account that doesn’t otherwise contribute to the community. If there’s any “x% self-ptomotion” threshold, they fail it, because it’s 100% self-promotion.
I know I also reported another post as slop recently but I don’t remember what it was.
Yeah. Abandonware isn’t cool generally
Honest question intended to spark discussion.
Does this mean that all “single developer” projects can be considered abandonware (that aren’t open source/forkable)?
Or really “all” non open source software really. Companies “can” die.
IMO, abandonware means software that is a dead-end upon its very release, with no hopes or plans for anyone to every build upon it. Abandonware is generally not extensible, follows no good design philosophy that would let someone else build it up, and embodies essentially nothing.
Even a 100-line throwaway Python script has more utility to someone when it is published on PasteBin or whatever. But something like a binary executable released with no source code, with no support, and with no intent by the developer to ever make anything more of it, that’s abandonware.
Thanks for the definition!
I’m tracking what you’re saying.
If there’s any “x% self-ptomotion” threshold, they fail it, because it’s 100% self-promotion.
Not with f/loss, just account age and they are above the threshold there.
I want a community where people can use AI to help build a tool and be able to post about it here. But unfortunately, I’m just not seeing that. The AI-generated apps seem to be coupled to a drive-by, AI generated post (and comment replies) all full of em dashes and the standard Claude slop language.
So, yes, mandate an AI tag. Hold posters to it and remove violators, because it seems to always be the same class of “contributors” that are cosplaying as software developers.
Not sure if your rule changes are touching this, but the worst offenders I don’t want to see here are:
- posting and commenting text written entirely by AI
- not open sourcing or giving any visibility into their code
- adopting a paid model
The people doing that remind me of the people who would approach me 20 years ago saying “hey I have an idea for an app I want you to build and I’ll give you 5% of my company. It’s like Facebook for dogs, but I need you to sign an NDA before I say any more”.
i agree with you. i have been working orofessionally as a software developer for over 27 years. i’ll use ai to help research something but i cant atand low effort full ai projects being posted.
i always saw non devs using ai to fully generate something for them personally to fix a very custom need but why do these people post projects thry honestly had no hand in.
Man it is great for creating custom apps to scratch your need. I have custom programs to filter out blocklists for one country and dynamically update firewall rules on unified gateways. Stuff that well never be put in as it would hurt their paid subscription.
The first bullet is, the other two are covered in the current rule 7 that just went live this week.
While part of promo, this is just about its own item here. In part because it could be something like “I wrote some of this script, got some ai help to talk to this closed device, here’s what I’m using” which doesn’t really fit promo, but still garners a lot of negative attention and comments.
I’m a bit hopeful this one would be of slightly broader benefit than just the straight up promo posts (which has a good amount of requirements now to filter out the garbage, though it does put some delays on f/loss projects that are well intentioned).
Just found the other rule post. Looks great!
I want a community where people can use AI to help build a tool
Sure, that’s github
and be able to post about it here
Fine, but others including myself want that slop as far away from here as possible. Maybe start another community? I suggest calling it c/vibehosted.
Fine, but others including myself want that slop as far away from here as possible
And there are people like me who are fine with moderate AI use and would rather judge the project themselves rather than have them rejected outright.
Maybe there should be a community poll
Why a vote to switch up an existing community? The admins have proposed the [AI] tag to mitigate slop projects.
You said you wanted a community to post vibe coded projects, go ahead and set it up. I don’t see why it needs to be foisted onto c/self hosted, unless you have some vested interest in boosting sloppy mcslopface projects.
I’m not sure I understand. First off I’m not the same person as GP. Second, the admins are proposing an AI tag, which I’m supportive of. I’m just saying that I am OK with AI-assisted projects being posted to this community (with the AI tag of course)
I would still prefer an additional [Non-AI] tag. Even if people are arguing against it - it is not same omitting an [AI] tag and consciously saying “I never used and never will use AI”. And the latter is the thing most users who want the AI-tag are looking for.
Same. It removes the ability to have plausible deniability of “oh I just forgot to tag it”—no, if you tagged it “non-AI” and it was actually vibe-coded, you clearly deliberately and consciously lied.
I’m going to actually +1 this as well.
Not a fan of a tag, since it’s not transparent enough. Sounds like every minor use of AI would warrant a tag, which seems past the point.
The disclosure comment I feel works well. People that care about if/how AI was used can check it to get a proper impression of the scale of and workflow for AI usage, and those who don’t care can ignore it.
I really like having the disclosure comment pinned for a more nuanced explanation of what, if any, AI went into a project or post. I think just a tag can’t capture the levels of AI use.
I’m personally a never-genAI, but, unless we go No AI as a community, I don’t think it makes sense to group all projects that touch AI for documentation with all that use it for testing with all that completely let the AI generate all their code, etc. And I don’t think setting a threshold for which get tagged makes sense either. Basically, a tag is misleading no matter how it’s implemented.
You know, after last week, I’ve landed on the position that this is an intractable debate. Both sides have valid points and neither side is willing to concede or meet in the middle. That’s just people.
Ironically, I think both sides want he same thing - no bots, no slop.
To that end, for the proper functioning of this group, I think that the wisdom of having an AI tag (even though I personally think it’s a blunt tool) is probably the only productive way forward. The pro and anti sides will not see eye to eye…but at least with [AI] tag, maybe the worst excesses of both may be mitigated.
Cynically, if we look at Reddit as a “what not to do” example…the only thing that stops Lemmy from becoming Reddit 2.0 is friction. The tag provides friction.
Anything that stops the real slop invasion (ala r/localllm et al) is a big plus. I’d like to think that almost all of the users here are savvy enough to tell slop from real, but at the end of the day, if every other post becomes slop, it gets exhausting to deal with.
Bot posts on Lemmy have been on the rise, as (presumably) people migrate from Reddit and bots follow.
If the new community rules + AI tags can mitigate both slop and the FuckAI crowd, I’m for trying it.
EDIT: I think the [AIT] proposed else where is better than straight [AI] tag.
My 2 cents are that the issue is promotion not AI, if people started promoting stuff made without AI that would still be spam.
From the rules:
F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, your post is exempt from the 10% requirement. The exception does not exempt you from the account age requirement.
I would propose making this the requirement and not an exception, forbid all promotion of closed source, and allow the 10% requirement for open source projects.
Unfortunately the comments I’ve seen and the reports I get would disagree. Even on older accounts that post and comment plenty.
Sounds like a good solution for me. I think most users dislike completely vibe coded apps, not ai supported apps. So maybe we should be more specific here.
For example: [Vibe-Coded]
This would also support new users finding the right tag.
Personally. I want an AI tag so I know to look more carefully.
I don’t mind AI speeding up a skilled engineer.
But I do mind a crypto bro, turned AI bro, with little experience, too eagerly advertising their vibe coded app.
Its too exhausting to audit everything I may be interested in and the AI tag would help me to budget and optimize my time.
I will say that having disclosure and/or tagging would mean that comments that just say “slop” or “fuck ai” or whatever would be off topic at that point, that information is already provided, so its just noise (and sometimes pretty uncivil - I’ve been light on that for now due to the need for a rule on this).
good idea
it won’t solve the “noise” problem though. I was relatively active on !imageai@sh.itjust.works and we were constantly nagged by sloppies even though the community is clearly dedicated to generativeArt
No, but with a rule in place like these, its clearly out of place and can be removed. I don’t harbor any delusions about not seeing those sort of comments.
Would be nice though. And I like being nice.
it won’t solve the “noise” problem though. I was relatively active on !imageai@sh.itjust.works and we were constantly nagged by sloppies even though the community is clearly dedicated to generativeArt
Maybe y’all would get less hate if the sub was called “generativeArt” instead of grifterly claiming to be “AI”.
i joined the community, i didn’t create it.
Also:
Anything with an [AI] tag, first thing in the title, will have a drive-by downvote issue.
Not sure how to deal with that, or if its even a concern.
EDIT:
Maybe it should be something else that’s not such a loaded keyword?
[ML] for Machine Learning? [SAI]? [LAI]?
I’ve been messing with ‘AI’ for a decade, and even I hate what the term has come to represent.
Oh I’m sure it will be. I don’t know if its a concern though - TBD I suppose.
TBD indeed. But it will effectively ‘downrank’ posts and their visibility, maybe into the negative vote range. I’ve seen highly negative scores across the board in more machine-learning focused subs, and that’s without a tag that catches the eye so easily.
I think even modifying the acronym could make a difference, though (as I ninja edited).
I do like the idea of a different tag, still easy to filter but less of a target like the ai generated communities out there.
Yeah. Just not sure what it should be, heh.
I will say, if it still has “AI” in the tag (like [LAI] or whatever), it would play nicer with keyword filters.
For what it’s worth, I asked my self-hosted LLM (MiMo 2.5, no network access outside my desktop), and it came with [AIT] (AI-Topic).
…I think that’s my favorite so far. [AIP] would work too.
I feel like that “obfuscates” the tag enough to blunt impulse downvotes in /new and feeds, without being deceptive or anything.
Actually both are pretty good - AIT for it as a more discussion oriented, AIP for a project post.
I like it, I think something like that would be a great idea
Oh, both! Yeah. I didn’t even think of that, but [AIT]/[AIP] as separate tags makes a lot of sense.
I’d like being able to filter by either, actually.
I guess two tags runs the risk of “rules too complex for some to follow,” but that’s more of a moderation load question. I have no say in that, heh.
Where should the line be drawn for what is AI coded vs AS assisted (in some manner) and thus tagged?
XerahS is very openly coded with AI and should be tagged. But what about the recent debate about the use of LLM in cURL?
So thats one of the questions that will need to go to a poll, but if I were to give my opinion it would be that any use would mean a tag, and the disclosure area is where it can be detailed.
Otherwise we’d end up with a bajillion differing tags, so a disclosure section makes more sense.
Not tagging for assisted would also mean setting arbitrary lines, and would be way too subjective imo.
The subtle irony of this shouldn’t escape us - your self hosted AI coming up with a solution to the tagging issue, causing you to be down voted.
It’s a good idea, anyway. [AIT] introduces just the right amount of friction while keeping transparency. +1 to your clanker’s suggestion.
Goood clanker. Pats my desktop.
This is one of my concerns also.
Maybe it should be something else that’s not such a loaded keyword?
Yes, since “AI” doesn’t exist, maybe we should use more accurate terminology. That would certainly deter those who don’t believe in the imaginary grift in “AI”.
I think this should be a thing. At the same time, I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists, but that is unlikely to end up being done. I think a simple tag, the [AI] one would work, is the best current solution. I think extra detail in the post is a good thing to do, for example AI assisted documentation, AI assisted bug finding, AI assisted vibe coding. They are all different and have different effects on the product and community. If someone uses AI to find bugs in their own code I am all for it, that is a great use if it. If they use AI to write their login system I am not keen at all given the likelihood of intense security issues and the low likelihood that they will ever fix it.
I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists
Ooh that would be good
I wonder if there is a database somewhere…
Promoting the imaginary grift of “AI” is almost the same thing as promoting the fascists who are profiting.
Thanks for grappling with this @curbstickle@anarchist.nexus
Yep. It is a time-suck to see an interesting new project only to check it out and find out it’s AI slop. For some apps, it doesn’t bother me… They may not require the access or stability of critical apps. Other times, I just can’t trust a slop app, and it would be very helpful to know which it is in advance.