Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Usage Policy

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 293 posts

Re: AI Usage Policy

#21

Post by lagniappe »

kanzure wrote: post #15

Another project simply paused external contributions entirely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 Another idea is to simply promote the donation of AI credits instead of output tokens. It would be better to donate credits, not outputs, because people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.

>people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.

In an ideal world sure, but I've seen the entire gamut from amateurs making surprising work to experts whose prompt history looks like a comedy of errors and gotchas. There's some "skill" I can't quite put my finger on when it comes to the way you must speak to an LLM vs another dev. There's more monkey-paw involved in the LLM process, in the sense that you get what you want, but do you want what you'll get?

Re: AI Usage Policy

#22

Post by optimalsolver »

jakozaur wrote: post #6

See x thread for rationale: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2014433315261124760?s=46&t=FU... “ Ultimately, I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly.” I have a side project, git-prompt-story to attach Claude Vode session in GitHub git notes. Though it is not that simple to do automatic (e.g. i need to redact credentials).

>I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly

I think AI could help with that.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#23

Post by nutjob2 »

A factor that people have not considered is that the copyright status of AI generated text is not settled law and precedent or new law may retroactively change the copyright status of a whole project.

Maybe a bit unlikely, but still an issue no one is really considering.

There has been a single ruling (I think) that AI generated code is uncopyrightable. There has been at least one affirmative fair use ruling. Both of these are from the lower courts. I'm still of the opinion that generative AI is not fair use because its clearly substitutive.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#24

Post by Version467 »

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 thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#25

Post by Etheryte »

Version467 wrote: post #24

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…

I worked for a major open-source company for half a decade. Everyone thinks their contribution is a gift and you should be grateful. To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".

Re: AI Usage Policy

#26

Post by direwolf20 »

nutjob2 wrote: post #23

A factor that people have not considered is that the copyright status of AI generated text is not settled law and precedent or new law may retroactively change the copyright status of a whole project. Maybe a bit unlikely, but still an issue no one is really considering. There has been a single ruling (I think) that AI generated code is uncopyrightable. There has been at least one affirmative fair use ruling. Both of…

This only matters if you get sued for copyright violation, though.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#27

Post by imiric »

arjunbajaj wrote: post #9

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 agree with you on the policy being balanced.

However:

> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.

Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?

According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.

Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Re: AI Usage Policy

#28

Post by kleiba »

Version467 wrote: post #24

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…

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#30

Post by DrewADesign »

Version467 wrote: post #24

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…

To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.

I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.

Post reply on HN