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.
Tbh I agree, if the code is appropriate why care if it’s generated by an LLM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking only on the programming part of the slop machine, programmers typically copy code anyways. It’s not an ethical issue for a programmer using a tool that has been trained on other people’s “stolen” code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A few years ago we were all arguing about how copyright is unfair to society and should be abolished.
Sure, but these same companies will drag you to court and rake you over the coals if you infringe on their copyrights.
More reason to destroy copyright.
Normal people can’t afford to fight the big companies who break theirs anyway. It’s only really a tool for big businesses to use against us.
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.)
Because its used to benefit megacorps in practice. This situation is just more proof of that.
Copyright is what makes the GPL license enforceable.
Licenses only matter if you care about copyright. I’d much rather just appropriate whatever I want, whenever I want, for whatever I want. Copyright is capitalist nonsense and I just don’t respect notions of who “owns” what. You won’t need the GPL if you abolish the concept of intellectual property entirely.
It is offensive to me on a philosophical level to see that so many people feel that they should have control, in perpetuity, over who can see/read/experience/use something that they’ve put from their mind into the world. Doubly so when considering that their own knowledge and perspective is shaped by the works of those who came before. Software especially. It is sad that capitalism has so thoroughly warped the notion of what society should be that even self-proclaimed leftists can’t imagine a world where everything isn’t transactional in some way.
Who is we? I wasn’t.
Just like how every other human artist learned how to draw by looking at examples their art teacher gave them, aka “stealing it” in your words.
LLMs are not sentient and they’re not learning.
“If” doing all the lifting here.
If we ignore the mountain of evidence saying the opposite…
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
Yeah. Call me if he starts using AI artwork.
so you draw the line at stealing artists work, but not programmers work?
Being a developer, I don’t care if someone else uses my code. Code is like a brick. By itself it has little value, the real value lies on how it is used.
If I find an optimal way to do something, my only wish is to make it available to as much people as possible. For those who comes after.
Sure, but that’s just your view.
And also not how LLMs work.
They gobble up everything and cause unreadable code. Not learning.
Tbh all programmers have been copy pasting from each other forever. The middle step of searching stack overflow or GitHub for the code you want is simply removed
That’s not what an LLM is doing is it.
Exactly. If someone has already come up with an optimal solution why the hell would I reimplement it. My real problems are not with LLMs themselves but rather the sourcing of the training data and the power usage. If I could use an “ethically sourced” llm locally I’d be mostly happy. Ultimately LLMs are also only good for code specifically. Architecture or things that require a lot of thought like data pipelines I’ve found AI to be pretty garbage at when experimenting
Lutris is GPL-licenced, so isn’t it the opposite of stealing?
No, the LLM was trained on other code (possibly including Lutris, but also probably like billions of lines from other things)
LLMs have stolen works from more than just artists.
ALL of public repositories at a minimum have been used as training, regardless of licence. including licneses that require all dirivitive work be under the same license.
so there’s more than just lutris stollen.
So he’s a badass Robinhood pirate that steals code from corporations and gives it to the people?
The fuck you talking about.
Using a tool with billions of dollars behind it robinhood?
How is stealing open source prihcets code regardless of license stealing fr corporation’s?