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.

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[–] 98 points 6 months ago (55 children)

Tbh I agree, if the code is appropriate why care if it’s generated by an LLM

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  • [–] 47 points 6 months ago (26 children)

    It's still made by the slop machine, the same one that could only be created by stealing every human made artwork that's ever been published. (And this is not "just one company", every LLM has this issue.)

    Not only that, the companies building massive datacenters are taking valuable resources from people just trying to live.

    If the developer isn't able to keep up, they should look for (co-)maintainers. Not turn to the greedy megacorps.

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  • [–] 42 points 6 months ago (13 children)

    A few years ago we were all arguing about how copyright is unfair to society and should be abolished.

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  • [–] 62 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, but these same companies will drag you to court and rake you over the coals if you infringe on their copyrights.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    Copyright is what makes the GPL license enforceable.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The GPL license only exists because copyright fucked over the public contract that it promised to society: Copyrights are temporary and will be given back to public domain. Instead, shitheads like Mark Twain and Disney extended copyright to practically forever.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    I don't understand your position here. If we went back to a more reasonable 7 or 14 year copyright term, how would that obviate the need for a license like the GPL, which permits instant use of code provided you share-alike? Those shorter copyright lengths would be pretty reasonable for books or movies, but would still suck for tech.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    We would be faaaaaar less hostile towards copyrights if we had a regular source of RECENT public domain coming out every year.

    I'm not saying that it would make GPL or OSS licenses useless. I'm just saying that the motivation and need for those licenses are because we don't live in a society where freely available media and data are much more commonplace.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    We weren't all saying copyright altogether was unfair. In fact i think most of us have always said copyright law should exist, just that it shouldn't be like 'lifetime of the creator plus another 75 years after their death'. Copyright should be closer to how it was when the law was first started, which is something like 20 years.

    (And personally imo there should also be some nuanced exceptions too.)

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

    If the developer isn't able to keep up, they should look for (co-)maintainers.

    Same energy as "Just go on Twitter and ask for free voice actors," a la Vivziepop. A lot of people think this kind of shit is super easy, but realistically, it's nearly impossible to get people to dedicate that kind of effort to something that can never be more than a money/time sink.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Absolutely true, but there's one clear and obvious way; drop support for the project yourself.

    If a FOSS project is archived/unmaintained, for a large enough project, someone else will pick up where the original left off.

    FOSS maintainers don't owe anyone anything. What some developers do is amazing and I want them to keep developing and maintaining their projects, but I don't fault them for quitting if they do.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago*

    XKCD, of course

    If a FOSS project is archived/unmaintained, for a large enough project, someone else will pick up where the original left off.

    No, they won't. This line of thinking is how we got the above.

    Their line of work is thankless, and nobody wants to do a fucking thankless job, especially when the last maintainer was given a bunch of shit for it.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    I was under the impression that FOSS developers do it for the love of the game and not for monetary compensation. They're literally putting the software out for free even though they don't need to. They are going to be making this shit regardless.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    That is what they are technically doing but they often don't always consider the consequences and often react poorly when they realize that an Amazon (it whatever) comes along and contributes nothing and monetizes their work while dumping the support and maintenance on them.

    That is the name of the game though if you use an MIT license.

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  • [–] 42 points 6 months ago

    It's all about curation and review. If they use AI to make the whole project, it's going to be bloated slop. If they use it to write sections that they then review, edit, and validate; then it's all good.

    I'm fairly anti-AI for most current applications, but I'm not against purpose-built tools for improving workflow. I use some of Photoshop's generative tools for editing parts of images I'm using for training material. Sometimes it does fine, sometimes I have to clean it up, and sometimes it's so bad it's not worth it. I'm being very selective, and if the details are wrong it's no good. In the end, it's still a photo I took, and it has some necessary touchups.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago
    • Ethical issue: products of the mind are what makes us humans. If we delegate art, intellectual works, creative labour, what's left of us?
    • Socio-economic issue: if we lose labour to AI, surely the value produced automatically will be redistributed to the ones who need it most? (Yeah we know the answer to this one)
    • Cultural issue: AIs are appropriating intellectual works and virtually transferring their usufruct to bloody billionaires
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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    If a human is reviewing the code they submit and owning the changes I don’t care if they use an LLM or not. It’s when you just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks that’s the problem.

    I’m more concerned with the admitted OpenClaw usage. That’s a hydrogen bomb heading straight for a fireworks factory.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago

    It's the same for me.

    I don't care if somebody uses Claude or Copilot if they take ownership and responsibility over the code it generates. If they ask AI to add a feature and it creates code that doesn't fit within the project guidelines, that's fine as long as they actually clean it up.

    I’m more concerned with the admitted OpenClaw usage. That’s a hydrogen bomb heading straight for a fireworks factory.

    This is the problem I have with it too. Using something that vulnerable to prompt injection to not only write code but commit it as well shows a complete lack of care for bare minimum security practices.

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Personally, I have never seen LLM generated code that works without needing to be edited, but I imagine for routine blocks of code and very common things it probably does fine. I dont see why a programmer needs to rewrite the same code blocks over and over again for different projects when an LLM can do that part leaving more time for the programmer to write the more specialized parts. The programmer will still have to edit and verify the generated code, but programming is more mechanical than something like art.

    However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn't be optimized or secure. However, this programmer claims to have 30 years of experience, and if thats the case then he likely knows this and probably edits the LLM output code himself.

    As I have said before, Generative AI is a tool, like PhotoShop. I dont see why people should reject a tool if it can make their job easier. It won't be able to completely replace people effectively. Businesses will try, but quality will drop off because its not being used by people that understand what the end result needs to be, and businesses will inevitably lose money.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn’t be optimized or secure.

    That's not completely true. Claude and some of the Chinese coding models have gotten a lot better at creating a good first pass.

    That's also why I like tests. Just force the model to prove that it works.

    Oh, you built the thing and think it's finished? Prove it. Go run it. Did it work? No? Then go fix the bugs. Does it compile now? Cool, run the unit test platform. Got more bugs? Fix them. Now, go write more unit tests to match the bugs you found. You keep running into the same coding issue? Go write some rules for me that tell yourself not to do that shit.

    I mean, I've been doing this programming shit for many decades, and even I've been caught by my overconfidence of trying to write some big project and thinking it's just going to work the first time. No reason to think even a high-powered Claude thinking model is going to magically just write the whole thing bug-free.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I want to one day make a game and there is no way I'm not prototyping it with llm code, though I would want to get things finalized by a real coder if I ever got the game finished but I've never made real progress on learning code even in school

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    While I know there is more nuance than this, but why should I spend any of my time on something, when you spent no time creating it? I know that applies more to the slop, but that's where I am with most LLM generated stuff.

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