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.
To admit some context: My company has strongly encouraged some AI usage in our coding. They also encourage us to be honest about how helpful, or not, it is. Usually, I tell them it turns out a lot of garbage and once in a while helps make a lengthy task easier.
I can believe him about there being a sweet spot; where it’s not used for everything, only for processes that might have taken a night of manual checks. The very real, very reasonable backlash to it is how easily a poor management team or overconfident engineer will fall away from that sweet spot, and merge stuff that hasn’t had enough scrutiny.
Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged on the senate floor that in a perfect world, where AI is owned by people invested in world benefit, moderate AI use could improve many people’s lives. It’s just sad that in 99.9% of cases, we’re not anywhere near that perfect world.
I don’t totally blame the dev for defending his use of AI backed by industry experience, if he’s still careful about it. But I also don’t blame people who don’t trust it. It’s kind of his call, and if the avoidance of AI is important enough to you, I’d say fork it. I think it’s a small red flag, but not nearly enough of one for me to condemn the project.
Worth mentioning that the user that started the issue jumps around projects and creates inflammatory issues to the same effect. I’m not surprised lutris’ maintainer went off like they did, the issue is not made with good faith.
Yes, both threads are led by two accounts with probably less than 50 commits to their names during the last year, none of which are of any relevance to the subject they are discussing.
In a world where you could contribute your time to make some things better, there is a certain category of people who seek out nice things specifically to harm them. As open source enters mainstream culture, it also appears on the radar of this kind of people. It’s dangerous to catch their attention, as once they have you they’ll coordinate over reddit, lemmy, github, discord to ruin your reputation. The reputation of some guy who never ever did them any harm apart from bringing them something they needed, for free, but in a way that doesn’t 100% satisfy them. Pure vicious entitlement.
I’d sooner have a drink with a salesman from OpenAI than with one of them.
you can criticise them but ultimately they are a unpaid developer making their work freely available to the benefit of us all. at least don’t harass the developer.
You make a fair point, but I feel like the trolling reaction they gave was asking for more backlash. Not responding was probably the best move.
It’s typical of dev burnout, though. Communication starts becoming more impulsive and less constructive, especially in the face of conflicts of opinions.
I’ve seen it play a few times already. A toxic community will take a dev who’s already struggling, troll them, screenshot their problematic responses, and use that in a campaign across relevant places such as github, reddit, lemmy… Maybe add a little light harassment on the side, as a treat. It’s a fun activity ! The dev spirals, posts increasingly unhinged responses and often quits as a result.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
I see your point. I might also have responded poorly to that, on some level at least.
Trolling? They gave a pretty good answer explaining their reasoning.
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.
Seems pretty obvious to me that they knew this wouldn’t go over well. It was inflammatory by design.
Yeah ok. True. I think the rest of the post has much more weight, though. But yeah, he should have swallowed that last sentence.
if you’re going to stoop so low as to use fucking AI have the decency to show it so people with actual standards know to avoid it. but to be fair, a cat n mouse game of whether it was used or not would make me avoid it anyway
They did but then people complained about them using AI
if you don’t want people to complain about you using AI, then don’t use AI. it’s easier than you think
I mean, I get if you wanna use AI for that, it’s your project, it’s free, you’re a volunteer, etc. I’m just not sure I like the idea that they’re obscuring what AI was involved with. I imagine it was done to reduce constant arguments about it, but I’d still prefer transparency.
I tried fitting AI into my workloads just as an experiment and failed. It’ll frequently reference APIs that don’t even exist or over engineer the shit out of something could be written in just a few lines of code. Often it would be a combo of the two.
I create custom embedded devices with displays and I’ve found it very useful for laying things out. Like asking it to take secondly wind speed and direction updates and build a Wind Rose out of it, with colored sections in each petal denoting the speed… it makes mistakes but then you just go back and reiterate on those mistakes. I’m able to do so much more, so much faster.
Yeah I mean. It’s not like AI can think. It’s just a glorified text predictor, the same you have on your phone keyboard
It’s like having an idiot employee that works for free. Depending on how you manage them, that employee can either do work to benefit you or just get in your way.
Considering the amount of damage AI has done to well-funded projects like Windows and Amazon’s services, I agree with this entirely. It might be crucial to help fix bigger issues down the line.
I expect because it wasn’t a user - just a random passer by throwing stones on their own personal crusade. The project only has two major contributors who are now being harassed in the issues for the choices they make about how to run their project.
Someone might fork it and continue with pure artisanal human crafted code but such forks tend to die off in the long run.
I’m the opposite. Its weird to me for someone to add an AI as a co author. Submit it as normal.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
“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.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
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?
I don’t support the use of AI tools in general, but i have a soft spot for long-term maintainers. These people generally don’t have enough support for this to be a full-time hobby, and when a project becomes popular the pressure is massive.
If the community wont step up to take the burden off the maintainer, but they still want active development, what can you do? As long as the program continues to be high quality, i cant complain about a free thing.
I don’t know what Lutris is so I guess I’ll continue to not use it.
It’s an automated tool for pulling the latest fixes to get a game running as well as it possibly can with as little fuss as possible. Basically a bunch of scripts to automatically pull mods and configuration options and such, especially for Linux compatibility.
The thing that will change society is the fact this dude is covering up all the Claude LLM contributions, that transparency which fosters trust in projects is fundamentally broken. He is creating a narrative that will allow others to simply use LLM sourced code and hide it in human created code. I don’t like that, it’s pretty disgusting in my opinion, as people should be able to see every bit of code and know who is responsible for it. Mathieu Comandon’s integrity is shattered by this serious trespass and it is one that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with. Put him on blast for that otherwise, others will try to do the same thing, potentially reducing the quality of open source projects. Claude LLM usage was already rancid enough…Enough for me to blacklist the whole thing.
As a lover of open source, I plan to skill up and start contributing myself…As there is a reality of not having enough time or people power to maintain such massive projects that have a big scope. I’m in the midst of learning the basics and figuring out what the best programming languages are to learn (Python is going to be my first). I don’t want the infection of LLMs to spread any more in the open source community…As there is no way that will turn out to be a net positive for the community.
While I fully agree with what you’re saying here, and that it should be stated, I personally believe that the only thing he’s done here is said the quiet part out loud.
Like other major projects of are stating that the main reason they don’t do a full AI ban is due to the fact that it’s increasingly difficult to be able to look at someone’s code contributions and say, yes, that’s AI versus that’s a human.
I recently made the swap-off of Sublime Text to Visual Studio Code because I was sick of the degradation in Sublime Text and there wasn’t any decent alternatives with the depreciation of atom a few years back.
I was amazed to find that OOtB visual code has a full on AI assisted coding setup with Ai assisted auto completion and suggestions and even has a chat box to talk with the model of choice. This setup by default doesn’t add any credits or attribution, and while isn’t anywhere near as intequate claude setup by default, it’s still AI assisted writing.
The only thing the public brigades are actually doing is making contributors hide that they are using it, which increases the problem like you mentioned.
A much better solution would be people stepping up to the plate and helping these projects, but it’s far easier to complain. I firmly understand why contributors have resorted to hiding the fact they use it, there’s far too much public outcry without enough support to not on most open sourced or publicly supported projects.
“The only thing the public brigades are actually doing is making contributors hide that they are using it, which increases the problem like you mentioned.”
As things are now, it would be best to eschew the use of LLMs; because LLMs are tainted with the dark, ignoble goals of Big Tech. In order to stop Big Tech’s plan, we need to object, reject, and force LLMs to become a money drain. Dropping LLMs would only help to burst this cursed bubble that techbros are desperately trying to keep inflated.
“A much better solution would be people stepping up to the plate and helping these projects, but it’s far easier to complain. I firmly understand why contributors have resorted to hiding the fact they use it, there’s far too much public outcry without enough support to not on most open sourced or publicly supported projects.“
If people are outright rejecting LLMs, it is better to drop these tools instead of embracing these things and using them in secret. Part of my drive to learn how to program is contributing to open source projects, but, the fact some of them embrace the use of LLMs to develop puts me off. However, despite this, learning to code and to contribute is of the utmost importance in order to help preserve the integrity of open source projects.
The things that are falsely called “AI” is a demotivating factor, as people start to feel the futility of learning if a thing that cannot think or feel might trump them and be used instead of them having a job in tech. It is going to create a brain drain event, because if there is not enough fresh blood staying interested in a field like programming and software dev…That will damage a lot of open source projects, and even the Linux Kernel. People age out and when those old heads die, all that institutional knowledge will go with them. As very few people will be able to carry the torch and that essential knowledge for the next generation. Big Tech doesn’t understand the full impact of their actions…They are greedy, disruptive fucks.
It wouldn’t be such a big deal if you weren’t facing immense harassment for using these tools. I don’t blame him for saying fuck it. If the code works, and has been reviewed/modified/approved by a human, then who cares.
I care. GenAI and AI bullshit is general is a massive ethical, environmental, and socio-economic mine field.
Simply accepting the use of LLM tools is going to send the incorrect message, as that can be masked as approval. It will make techbros that peddle slopware bolder, however, I don’t condone harassment (be loud, clear, and don’t harass). It does matter because again, transparency is key and that builds trust in open source projects. You might not care, but there are a lot of people that feel integrity in the code base matters as you are running that shit on your machine if you install it. To hide the sources of code, that is closed source behavior, and we cannot even properly evaluate a lot of the code they sling.
I dunno if anyone has a right to be talking about “integrity of their machine” when that machine was built using slave labor and mining processes that heavily pollute poor countries.
Up until recently, Lutris worked perfectly for me. Ever since around the release of Wine 11, though, cant get anything to even install, let alone play. This might explain my increasing frustration with the app.
Guess I’m going back to using Bottles for the odd game or app I don’t feel like trying to shoehorn into steam.
I am very much a beginner, and until now lutris was kind of my default answer for “how the hell do I get that windows exe installer to spit its entrails so I can run it through wine” (or even native engines like VCMI, Daggerfall Unity and Creatures Docking Station).
For everything that doesn’t come from Steam, obviously.
What is the more direct way? Does Bottles do that? I haven’t tried it yet.
If you’re talking about games, I usually just add the exe to Steam as a non-Steam game and enable proton for it
While I may not agree that letting AI write the code is a good idea, the complaints are dumber. It’s open source. Just fork it if you have a problem with it.
Trying to hide it is shitty and immature, though. Even more reason to just fork it. They are proving they don’t have the maturity or transparency needed to run a project like that.
I hear this argument a lot about many things but how is “just fork it” the answer? It’s not like just anyone can fork any project and continue developing it. The alternative would be forking it and consider it final version or what?
But if it’s your project and you build the software for yourself, then why should he do what someone else wants?
The just fork it argument is valid as the source is open, there are several projects born from forks. Specifically for game/wine managers there are other options…
Regardless of the slop, I’m grateful to the developers and maintainers that take the time to share their work.
It’s not like just anyone can fork any project and continue developing it.
Why not? Happens all the time.
I hear this argument a lot about many things
Perhaps there’s a reason you hear it so often about so many things?
This same principle also applies to the fediverse. An instance makes policy decisions that you don’t agree with? That’s okay, you can always host your own instance and make your own policies.
Well sure, software gets forked and continued all the time, but there’s quite a stark difference between just using open source software or actively maintain it. Not everyone is a software developer, so I still don’t see why “just fork it” is the answer. Those who have the capabilities probably already thought of it no?
software gets forked and continued all the time
If you understand that this is true, then I don’t really understand your argument. If this happens all the time for other software, then why won’t it for Lutris? You’re just saying that people who are not software developers cannot develop software? Okay… yeah.
Those people are already completely dependent on software developers and their choices for all of the software they use, whether closed or open source, anyway.
I’m not providing any argument, I’m just asking.
Okay, so yeah if you’re not a software developer, then forking it and developing the software is not an option for you. Your only option is to simply continue waiting for all of the software you use to be created by other people and handed to you, like you do already.
I’m over here on Bazzite learning that I literally can’t uninstall it without switching to a different OS. :/
You can build your own OS image that doesn’t have it, but I honestly have no idea how to do that.
Would be nice to have a ujust command to remove packages from the default Bazzite image.
That’s the one downside of using Bazzite, but Fagus Launcher might be chosen over Lutris (leading to it being removed) if it does well in the testing branch. So, I’d wait and see because you won’t be forced to use Lutris, but, it will sit there menacingly in your Bazzite installation.
That’s awesome! I’m glad work is already being done to allow for alternate launchers. I stick to just Steam, so I haven’t even used Lutris up until now and I was surprised how much it’s baked in to the OS. Trying to uninstall it just leads to its flatpak entry in the Discovery store, where it appears to be not installed. That looked like buggy behavior, and it took some research to learn what was actually going on.
Getting real tired of this armchair activism, man. I get it, we all hate LLMs but it’s literally one or two burnt out guys writing this in their spare time. If people really want to do something useful at least go and review the code and then you can shit on his work for legitimate reasons if you really do find it’s bad. Stop demonizing open source devs ffs.
You’re going to screech at this guy contributing his time and code, who in all likelihood will pump out more features. Absurd. Prejudice and fear has blinded a significant portion of the foss community
I wonder if they’ll be able to use this ai to finally generate ssl keys for the Debian repo…
