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LLM policy?

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Re: LLM policy?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantity and velocity of misinformation are both critical variables here. Any one person's writing was always untrustworthy, but the majority of that bad writing didn't make it to a printing press, nor was it mass-distributed. Let's accept the proposition that all forms of media have always been full of lies. We can say that debunking always follows lies, truth spreads more slowly than fiction. The quantity and veloc…

The total amount of generated untrustworthy content is irrelevant. People must learn to only read content from trusted sources, and then it won't matter how much misinformation is being published in other places. It was never difficult to publish large amounts of misinformation, AI is only making it cheaper.

>>The total amount of generated untrustworthy content is irrelevant

Of course it is relevant. Discerning which sources to trust takes valuable time. Sources which were once trusted may need to be reevaluated.

>>It was never difficult to publish large amounts of misinformation, AI is only making it cheaper.

What is the difference between difficulty and expense?

Re: LLM policy?

#132
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted but I think I get what you're getting at. When I was doing my masters a few months ago, I would get my assignments rejected whenever I didn't run them through Grammarly first. I have nothing against Grammarly, it's a useful too, but I find that it has the tendency to reject things that (as far as I can tell) are still technically correct but don't have the "AI vibe" to it. I suspect that the gr…

what do you mean your assignments were rejected? like rejected for being AI generated?

No, they weren’t AI generated. They have people judging grammar, and I think they will run it through grammarly to automate it.

I wrote the stuff myself.

Re: LLM policy?

#133
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it the antibody effect. My favorite example is clickbait headlines like, "Five things you MUST do if you're doing this thing. You'd never guess #3!" It used to be everywhere and now it's nowhere. AI is starting to show this effect - people stay away from em-dashes. There's that yellowish tinge and that composition which people avoid on art. Some of this is bad, but we can probably live without it.

> "Five things you MUST do if you're doing this thing. You'd never guess #3!" It used to be everywhere and now it's nowhere. Try opening YouTube in an incognito window sometime. Scrolling through a few, I see: * Banned Amazon Products you NEED to See to Believe! * This has NEVER Happened Before... (Severe Weather Channel) * Our Dog got Married and had PUPPIES! THE MOVIE Emotional * I WENT TO GHOST TOWN AND SOMETHING…

Okay, maybe YT is the exception, but some of them claim it's because the algorithm punishes otherwise.

Re: LLM policy?

#134
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(OP here.) Well, we don't receive that many low-quality PRs in general (I opened this issue to discuss solutions before it becomes a real problem). Speaking personally, when it does happen I try to help mentor the person to improve their code or (in the case where the person isn't responsive) I sit down and make the improvements I would've made and explain why they were made as a comment in the PR. When it comes to L…

Hope you can forgive this tangent, I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... So hopefully this is a middle ground, you can excuse or ignore First, my original comment was going to ask if you're looked at what any other reputable repos are doing. Specifically popular FOSS projects that are not backed by a company looking to sell AI. Do any of them have a positive Policy, or positions t…

> I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... [...] you posted the Issue as an RFC. but then explicitly excluded, HN from commenting on the issue. I think that was a fantastic decision, and expertly written. (I also appreciate that lesson in tactfulness :) ) That said, if you're actually interested in requesting comments or thoughts you wouldn't have considered, I would encourage you to make a top level RFC comment this thread.

Well, I posted this as an RFC for other runc maintainers and contributors, I didn't expect it to get posted to Hacker News. I don't particularly mind hearing outsiders' opinions but it's very easy for things to get sidetracked / spammy if people with no stake in the game start leaving comments. My goal with the comment about "don't be spammy" was exactly that -- you're free to leave a comment, just think about whether it's adding to conversation or just looks like spam.

> Specifically popular FOSS projects that are not backed by a company looking to sell AI. Do any of them have a positive Policy, or positions that you want to include?

I haven't taken a very deep look, but from what I've seen, the most common setups are "blanket ban" and "blanket approval". After thinking about this for a few days, I'm starting to lean more towards:

  1. LLM use must be marked as such (upfront) so maintainers know what they are dealing with, and possibly to (de)prioritise it if they wish.
  2. Users are expected to (in the case of code contributions) have verified that their code is reasonable and they understand what it does, and/or (in the case of PRs) to have verified that the description is actually accurate.
Though if we end up with such a policy we will need to add AGENTS.md files to try to force this to happen, and we will probably need to have very harsh punishments for people who try to skirt the requirements.

> Lobste.rs github disallows AI contribution for an entirely different reason I haven't seen covered in your GH thread yet

AFAICS, it's because of copyright concerns? I did mention it in my initial comment, but I think that far too much of our industry is turning a blind eye to that issue that focusing on that is just going to lead to drawn out arguments with people cosplaying as lawyers (badly). I think that even absent of the obvious copyright issues, it is not possible to honestly sign the Developer Certificate of Origin[1] (a requirement to contribute to most Linux Foundation projects) so AI PRs should probably be rejected on that basis alone.

But again, everyone wants to discuss the utility of AI so I thought that was the simplest thing to start the discussion with. Also the recent court decisions in the Meta and Anthropic cases[2] (while not acting as precedent) are a bit disheartening for those of us with the view that LLMs are obviously industrial-grade copyright infringement machines.

[1]: https://developercertificate.org/ [2]: https://observer.com/2025/06/meta-anthropic-fair-use-wins-ai...

Re: LLM policy?

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're really not, though. Creating garbage is the one ability at which LLMs are unarguably superhuman.

I think the opposite. LLMs do good work if you know what you’re doing across the board. Having 20 years experience writing code, it’s made things even better for me and even more fun. To those hating, they probably never wrote a system in their life.

I didn't say it's impossible for LLMs to do good work. That wasn't the question.

Re: LLM policy?

#136
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you can forgive this tangent, I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... So hopefully this is a middle ground, you can excuse or ignore First, my original comment was going to ask if you're looked at what any other reputable repos are doing. Specifically popular FOSS projects that are not backed by a company looking to sell AI. Do any of them have a positive Policy, or positions t…

> I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... [...] you posted the Issue as an RFC. but then explicitly excluded, HN from commenting on the issue. I think that was a fantastic decision, and expertly written. (I also appreciate that lesson in tactfulness :) ) That said, if you're actually interested in requesting comments or thoughts you wouldn't have considered, I would encourage you to…

> it's because of copyright concerns?

Nominatively, yes. But I think I would describe it as risk tolerance. I'm going to be one of those bad cosplayers and assert that the two rulings mentioned even if they were precedent setting, don't actually apply to the risks themselves. Could you win a case is much less important than if you could survive the court costs. There's no doubt some value in LLM based code generation to many individuals. But does it's value outweigh the risks to a community?

> and we will probably need to have very harsh punishments for people who try to skirt the requirements.

I would need to spend hours of time to articulate exactly how uncomfortable this would make me if I was working along side you. So please forgive this abbreviated abstract. One of the worst things you can do to a community, is put it on rails towards an adversarial relationship. There's going to be a lot of administrative overhead to enabling this, it will be incredibly difficult to get the fairness correct the first time, and I assume (possibly without cause?) it's unlikely to feel fair to everyone if you ever need to enforce it. Is that effort and attention and time best spent there?

I believe that no matter what you decide, blanket acceptance, vs blanket denial, vs some middle ground, you're going to have to spend some of the reputation of the project on making the new rule.

If you ban it, you will turn away some contributions or new contributors, and a small subset of committers may see their velocity decrease. This counts for some value loss (some positive and some negative) But also accounts for decreased time costs... or rather it enables you to spend more time on people and their work instead.

If you allow it, you adopt a large set of new poorly understood risks, and administrative overhead, and time you could have spent working with other people... It will also, turn away contributors.

I'm not going to pretend like there was a chance in hell anyone should believe that I was likely to contribute to runc. It's possible in some hypothetical, but extremely unlikely in the current reality. And, if I cared enough about the diff I wanted to submit upstream, I still would open a PR... but, I saw an AGENTS.md in a different repo that I was considering using, was disappointed and decided not to use that repo. Seeing runc embrace AI code generation would without a doubt, cause me to look for an alternative, I assume a reasonable alt probably doesn't exist, and I would resign myself to the disappointment of using runc. I agree with your argument that it's commercial grade copyright laundering, but that's not my core ethical objection to its use.

> In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. So the only real suggestion that I have is make sure you remember to optimize for how you want to spend your time. Calculate not just the expected value of the code within the repo, but the expected value of the people working on the repo.

Re: LLM policy?

#137
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I considered posting this in the GH thread, but you asked nicely not to... [...] you posted the Issue as an RFC. but then explicitly excluded, HN from commenting on the issue. I think that was a fantastic decision, and expertly written. (I also appreciate that lesson in tactfulness :) ) That said, if you're actually interested in requesting comments or thoughts you wouldn't have considered, I would encourage you to…

> it's because of copyright concerns? Nominatively, yes. But I think I would describe it as risk tolerance. I'm going to be one of those bad cosplayers and assert that the two rulings mentioned even if they were precedent setting, don't actually apply to the risks themselves. Could you win a case is much less important than if you could survive the court costs. There's no doubt some value in LLM based code generation…

> I would need to spend hours of time to articulate exactly how uncomfortable this would make me if I was working along side you.

I think this came out a little wrong -- my point was that if we are going to go with a middle-ground approach then we need to have a much lower tolerance for people who try to abuse the trust we gave in providing a middle-ground. (Also, there is little purpose in having a policy if you don't enforce it.)

For instance, someone knowing that I will deprioritise LLM PRs, and instead of deciding to write the code themselves or accept that that what I work on is my own personal decision to make, they instead decide to try to mask their LLM PR and lie about it -- I would consider this to be completely unacceptable behaviour in any kind of professional relationship.

(For what it's worth, I also consider it bad form to submit any patches or bug reports generated by any tool -- LLM or not -- without explaining what the tool was and what you did with it. The default assumption I have when talking to a human is that they personally did or saw something, but if a tool did it then not mentioning it feels dishonest in more ways than one.)

I did see that lobste.rs did a fairly cute trick to try to block agentic LLMs[1].

[1]: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/1733

Re: LLM policy?

#138
post #65
post #25

I've seen an interesting politically motivated one. It didn't appear to be a bot, just a user from China: https://github.com/umami-software/umami/pull/3678 The goal is "Taiwan" -> "Taiwan, Province of China" but via the premise of updating to UN ISO standards, which of course does not allow Taiwan. The comment after was interesting with how reasonable it sounds: "This is the technical specification of the ISO 3166-1…

One of these days I need to make a bot that scans FOSS repos for this kind of little pink nonsense behavior. The insecurity of wanting to call a place "country name, province of different country name" should alone be mocked. Imagine, "Ukraine, province of Russia," or "India, colony of The United Kingdom." Absurd on its face.

The problem with this is that, for some folks, its not absurd or nonsense because that is not considered a "country name" to them. It is considered a province name. So the inverse (calling a province a country) is considered absurd/nonsense.

Re: LLM policy?

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Five things you MUST do if you're doing this thing. You'd never guess #3!" It used to be everywhere and now it's nowhere. Try opening YouTube in an incognito window sometime. Scrolling through a few, I see: * Banned Amazon Products you NEED to See to Believe! * This has NEVER Happened Before... (Severe Weather Channel) * Our Dog got Married and had PUPPIES! THE MOVIE Emotional * I WENT TO GHOST TOWN AND SOMETHING…

Absolutely. I block at least three channels a week because YouTube keeps recommending clickbait titles and 'tuber face thumbnails. Bonus points if said 'tuber is pointing at something with their hand and also a red arrow and/or circle which id also blurred out. Intolerable.

Instead of blocking channels, trying going through your watch history and deleting anything you've watched in the past that's similar to those. YouTube heavily leans on your history for recommendations, so if it's recommending those, it's because you've watched related stuff.

My YouTube feed never recommends any of that garbage.

Re: LLM policy?

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean your assignments were rejected? like rejected for being AI generated?

No, they weren’t AI generated. They have people judging grammar, and I think they will run it through grammarly to automate it. I wrote the stuff myself.

yeah yeah I got that I'm just confused what justification your graders gave for rejection. I've never heard of a paper rejected on account of grammar
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