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.
This guy is maintaining that huge project for an eternity in his free time, but entitled hypocrits like you have audacity to call him an asshole. No one needs your recommendations. Even if you have experience to maintain and develop a project for 16 years and your brain is capable to keep everything in the context, and type hundreds of lines manually for the most tedious tasks—good for you, but there are different people with different brains. AI helpers with proper tooling is a good instrument in hands of a good engineer. They are basically better autocomplete and searching tools, and they are amazing ‘rubber duck’ companions making coding process psychologically easier if you stressed, anxious, or depressed, but need the job to be done. If you think what you’re doing, you won’t produce slop whatever instrument you use, if not—you’ll write slop without AI.
When bubble pops soon, AI have to become sustainable economically and ecologically. Same happened during the dotcom bubble.
So, either help the project, or leave opensource devs alone
Nobody is beyond reproach, and nobody gets free passes, especially with the flagrant attitude they’ve shown toward concerns and criticism.
Yeah, you can be glad this guy is putting in his hours and life into a free project but still be upset by the decisions he makes. I get not harassing him but we aren’t allowed to critique people either? Especially for an app that is widely used.
Sure, but your opinion of them doesn’t really matter all that much. You’re acting like your judgment is somehow important to anything. But that’s not really true, now is it?
If the opinion of the public is as inconsequential as you think, then you have no reason to engage with it at all.
So you’re going to stop?
Lmao. I have nothing but respect for FOSS projects and have donated plenty of money to many.
What I am not supporting is the use the of AI, if they want to, then they can, I will just stop using their project.
Yes, you are an asshole if you dont disclose it and the comments I’ve seen from him just cements that for me more.
AI can fuck off, we havent needed it for decades and decades, we dont need it now.
I get your argument, you consider AI bad and require the use of it to be disclosed so that you can avoid it - reasonable take.
My question is, do you avoid projects that use GitHub for hosting? Because that’s supporting Microsoft, which is helping ICE kill people. So the ethical thing to do is to boycott GitHub and projects that use it.
Do you require open source projects to disclose that they use any US-made hardware or software in their development? Because taxes from the sale of them fund missiles that kill children in Iran.
What is the list of things in your mind, that a maintainer has to disclose in order for you to not consider him an asshole for not disclosing it? Surely not just AI use?
No-no, it’s only AI, and you harass not someone who produces it, but who uses it. That’s how it works
It’s always the extreme comparisons…
You must simply sit in an empty space and do nothing in order to avoid links to some disgusting actions or morals. You arent stupid, you know that.
I avoid GitHub as much as I can, but you know it’s impossible to completely avoid it while still using many FOSS projects. But lets see, if I visit GitHub to download a project, I am only using up their bandwidth, costing Microsoft money, not giving them any. Youll argue the clicks increases their popularity and thats worth more etc and on and on…
Hardware… yes of course… the food you eat… yes… its pointless comparisons. A classic argument technique though.
The talking point is AI and I avoid AI as much as I can.
Well, I agree with you, the only way to not do anything unethical is to do nothing. So my point is that it’s not really useful to deal in absolutes, it’s impossible to take a stance on everything. You don’t like AI and avoid it, that’s a respectable position. Someone else is vegan and calls you an asshole for causing the suffering of animals instead (if for the sake of the argument I assume you aren’t vegan). That doesn’t help anyone. Set your own moral compass and follow your own principles, but I don’t think it’s useful to hound other people, because there will always be reasons to do so.
Im allowed to express my opinion on a topic or someone as much as anyone is. If you dont like that, you dont have to engage with it. If someone disagrees with me or calls me an asshole, that’s fine, I’ll take their opinion onboard, but I wont lose sleep over it.
Hounding someone would be commenting about them in every location possible, which I am not doing. If multiple people share my opinion and have posted it elsewhere, thats also not hounding.
What? Why??
Because current AI products attract huge investments and do not pay off at all. Basically they companies have unlimited money, and spend them on building huge data centres and facilities. But as soon as finding will run out, they have to moderate appetites. Many companies will flop and go bankrupt or just switch to something else. Cheap and local LLMs with high efficiency/cost rate should be dominant, as they won’t need so much infrastructure to support. Kinda similar was during dotcom bubble, but average person didn’t knew and care about ecology and ethics so much as nowadays.
That’s why I hate when “morally impeccable” people find an easy target, make it a scapegoat, and bully them online.