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.
FOSS projects are built on trust. The developer removing the co-author attribute due to backlash followed by seemingly taunting people by telling them good luck to identify which is LLM code and which is human code is just plain bad behavior.
Own what you do. Be transparent with the community. The backlash isn’t going to kill you. But you dig yourself a deeper grave by openly admitting to obfuscate the development process of a FOSS project.
My personal issue is his choice of the model used. He’s chosen Anthropic which is complicit in a war, whose AI is being used by the military to further military interests. Out of many more ethical models out there, why go with that one specifically?
Because it is the better tool in the usecase that he is engaging with.
You’re setting up an impossible standard, one that you don’t follow yourself.
You know that Social Media is used to spread propaganda throughout the world, leading to hate crimes, genocides, wars, sexual exploitation etc. You’re still using social media. There are many more ethical ways to talk to people, why go with social media specifically?
All you’ve discovered is that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You can take anything that a person does and trace the supply chain to find examples of wholly immoral behavior. Unless you plan on living in a cave, you’re going to appear like a hypocrite at the very least if you start picking apart the choices of others under that lens.
I wish you had addressed the first two paragraphs I wrote, as I feel they’re a bit more relevant and tie into the developer’s chosen behavior more than his choice of an AI helper.
What is the standard?
Many platforms make active efforts to suppress the propaganda. But I concede that people do have the need to choose a platform that reaches the widest possible audience, especially if it concerns a project that needs broader attention.
But an LLM isn’t this. An LLM isn’t a platform. It’s a utility tool. One for creation. A previous commenter pointed out that the developer tried to pick a model that isn’t helping the military. So this should show the developer has an ethical stance. Maybe this happened before Anthropic began aiding the military.
I wonder if his choice has been or if it will be changed.
In case this isn’t a rhetorical question, Claude is considered to be leading the pack for developer functionality. I can’t comment on the overall decision process, but it’s clear that lots of people a) don’t think about ethical concerns b) don’t prioritize them in decisions or c) align.
All we can really do is ask that people consider these things or explain their process so we can make informed decisions.
fwiw it’s worth I agree with your general points.
I mean in Hus rant he literally said he choose an AI company that doesn’t work with the military. Which is funny. I mean they took a stance against them in the future bit they did work with them.
I’d be interested to know where you draw the line of code ownership. Arguably FOSS is the place where projects are most likely to become a Ship of Theseus.
From my perspective AI slop is pretty unusable as it comes out, but can be an approximate starting point. It seems generous to call an LLM a coauthor, I’d be more likely to have a long list of Stack Overflow commenters as coauthors first.