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.
If there’s no difference in quality why obfuscate it? Why hide something that you think is a valuable tool if your code can speak for itself?
He could have used that opportunity to take a standing his own way “this is what I am doing and if you don’t like it feel free to make a fork but I think this is blown out of proportion for: (reasons he could list his opinions on)”
But being like “good luck finding it now” is 100% malicious in this context. Or if malicious is too strong of a word for this, its definitely not user friendly at all.
And certainly not very “open”.
The timeline was that he started adding attribution indicating the use of AI.
Then the anti-AI drones started bombarding the Github, Discord and forums with harassment. His recent statements and removal of attribution are entirely addressed at and because of the anti-AI people harassing the project staff.
He’s not removing it and saying ‘fuck you’ to the users. He’s tired of being harassed by third parties who are not involved with the project in any way and so he removed the source of the harassment.
I don’t see it as obfuscation if there is no underlying difference. Why treat working code differently depending on the source if what matters is that it works (which it does by definition). Of course there has to be more quality control if AI is able to produce more code, but I don’t think that’s the point here right? Why highlight the different sources of the code if, as you said, the code can speak for itself. What’s the difference to you if you can’t tell them apart?
The difference is that AI is a known issue creator (that huntarrr app comes to mind) with many projects and AI usage is supposed to be disclosed transparently for compliance with copyrights and licensing.
But even despite all that its kind of a shitty way to go about it the way he did, in my opinion.