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AI Usage Policy

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181–190 of 293 posts

Re: AI Usage Policy

#181

> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy. I find this distinction between media and text/code so interesting. To me it sounds like they think "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media. But judging from how AI companies grabbed all the art, images, videos, and…

It's not that code is distinct or "less than" art. It's an authority and boundaries question.

I've written a fair amount of open source code. On anything like a per-capita basis, I'm way above median in terms of what I've contributed (without consent) to the training of these tools. I'm also specifically "in the crosshairs" in terms of work loss from automation of software development.

I don't find it hard to convince myself that I have moral authority to think about the usage of gen AI for writing code.

The same is not true for digital art.

There, the contribution-without-consent, aka theft, (I could frame it differently when I was the victim, but here I can't) is entirely from people other than me. The current and future damages won't be born by me.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#182

"Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with human use." should always be a bare minimum requirement.

AI is so smart these days that I typically just ask Claude to verify the code for me.

This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#183

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…

Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have." And this is one half of why I think "Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public." isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate…

In a functioning society the primary mechanism to deal with violation of social norms is (temporary or permanent) social exclusion and in consequence the loss of future cooperative benefits.

To demand public humiliation doesn’t just put you on the same level as our medieval ancestors, who responded to violations of social norms with the pillory - it’s actually even worse: the contemporary internet pillory never forgets.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.

The high-trust Boomer brain cannot comprehend the actual low-trust society of grifters in which we live.

I don't agree with this blanket statement. The internet is low trust for lots of reasons, but regular (read small, proximal/spatiotemporally constrained) communities still exist and are not grifters all the way down. Acknowledging that distant strangers are not trustworthy in the traditional sense seems reasonable, but is categorically different than addressing natural social groups (small and local).

Re: AI Usage Policy

#187
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate…

My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.

Point out to your boss that trillion dollar companies have million dollar lawyers making sure their terms of service put all responsibility on the user, and if someone still tries to sue them they hire $2000/hour litigators from top law firms to deal with it.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#188

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…

Kind of by definition we will not see the people who do not submit frivolous PRs that waste the time of other people. So keep in mind that there's likely a huge amount of survivor bias involved. Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions…

All email is spam.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have." And this is one half of why I think "Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public." isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing. What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?

Temporary or permanent social exclusion, and consequently the loss of future cooperative benefits.

A permanent public internet pillory isn’t just useless against the worst offenders, who are shameless anyway. It’s also permanently damaging to those who are still learning societal norms.

The Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance in this regard. No consideration for the age or experience of the offender. No consideration for how serious the offense actually was.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#190

I can see this becoming a pretty generally accepted AI usage policy. Very balanced. Covers most of the points I'm sure many of us have experienced here while developing with AI. Most importantly, AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite. On that last point, whenever I've gotten Codex to generate a substantial feature, usually I've had to rewrite a lot of the code to make it…

I think I’m going to use it as a guide for our own internal AI guideline. We hire a lot of contractors and the amount of just awful code we get is really taking a toll and slowing site buildouts.
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