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LLM policy?

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Re: LLM policy?

#51
post #22

A much bigger problem is that when an AI/LLM coughs up code, you have absolutely no idea what the copyright or license is.

Copyright in the context of LLM's is kind of weird. It doesn't explicitly copy others code but it does lean heavily on the structure of it. Is it evidence of copying prior work or is it fair use? Alas, we don't really have any legal bearing that can handle this yet. If it is copying prior work, then you are right that there would be a lot of cross licensing bleed through. The opposite is also true in that it could ta…

We don’t know if it is weird yet, right? It is just a big question mark.

I guess as some point there will be a massive lawsuit. But, so much of the economy is wrapped up in this stuff nowadays, the folks paying for Justice System Premium Edition probably prefer not to have anything solid yet.

Re: LLM policy?

#52

Curious to know if others are seeing a similar uptick in AI slop in issues or PRs for projects they are maintaining. If yes, how are you dealing with this? Some of the software that I maintain is critical to container ecosystem and I'm an extremely paranoid developer who starts investigating any github issue within a few minutes of it opening. Now, some of these AI slop github issues have a way to "gaslight" me into…

I haven’t seen anything obvious, even including the other repos where I look through issues a lot.

Maybe it’s only the really popular and buzzword-y repos that are targets?

In my experience, the people trying to leverage LLMs for career advancement are drawn to the most high profile projects and buzzwords, where they think making PRs and getting commits will give them maximum career boost value. I don’t think they spend time playing in the boring repos that aren’t hot projects.

Re: LLM policy?

#53
post #47

Since the cat is out of the bag (i.e. there's no stopping of LLM-generated code / PR / issues now that vibe-coding is fairly universally accessible), the only thing in our (especially those who are custodians of software systems and products) control is to invest a lot more in testing and evals. Just plain opposing LLM-generated content as a policy is a losing battle at this point..

I disagree. I think there’s a near future where this is true, but we’re still at the point where you can cut down on a lot of spam/slop by rejecting the class of LLM-generated content as a policy.

Re: LLM policy?

#54
As an open source maintainer, I don't have an issue with AI; I have an issue with low quality slop whether it comes from a machine or from a human.

The responsibility then is for an open source project to not be shy on calling out low quality/low effort work, have good integ tests and linters, and have guidance like AGENTS.md files that tell coding robots how to be successful in the repo.

Re: LLM policy?

#55
post #29

I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.

I think we should start calling LLM-generated data 'dis-content'.

How bout "botshit"?

Re: LLM policy?

#56

I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.

I personally am more afraid of not the exact opposite, but more that AI will cause us to have too little content more than we will have too much. I just notice with myself how much less I’m using Wikipedia or forums, and get my answers from OpenAI or Antrophic. From what I remember it’s a over 20% drop in Wikipedia traffic from monthly 2022 vs 2025.

Re: LLM policy?

#57

I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.

In some ways I'm starting to enjoy this. Do you remember the 419 scams? 'Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince named Michael Jordan. Give me $50 so I can buy some chemicals to clean a bunch of money I secretly stowed away and I'll send you $5000.' People actually used to fall for that. Of course some people probably still would (and a lot more certainly gets blocked by spam blockers) but I think overall society grew less substan…

Let's think about this algorithmically.

If something "floods the zone with shit," it needs S amount of shit to cause a flood. But too much will eventually make the scam ineffectual. Widespread public distrust for the scam is (S+X)/time where X is the extra amount of shit beyond the minimum needed. Time is a global variable constrained by the rate at which people get burned or otherwise catch on to all other scams of the same variety. If we imagine that time-to-distrust shrinks with each new iteration of shit, then X the amount of excessive shit needed to trigger distrust should decrease over time.

The longer term problem is the externality where nothing is trusted, and the whole zone is destroyed. When that zone was "what someone wrote down that Socrates might have said," or "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," or "emails from unknown senders," that was one thing. A new baseline could be set for 'S'. When it's all writing, all art, all music and all commentary on those things, it seems catastrophic. The whole cave is flooded with shit.

Re: LLM policy?

#58
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should start calling LLM-generated data 'dis-content'.

How bout "botshit"?

We already have definition “AI slop”:

> AI slop is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence, specifically when perceived to show a lack of effort, quality or deeper meaning, and an overwhelming volume of production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop

Re: LLM policy?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I think overall society grew less substantially less gullible over time. Absolutely not. All that happened is most people became aware that "Nigerians offering you money are scammers." But they still fall for other get rich quick schemes so long as it diverges a little bit from that known pattern, and they'll confidently walk into the scam despite being warned and saying, "It's not a scam, dumbass. It's not lik…

I'm inclined to disagree just because photoshop has had a measurable effect on the population being skeptical of photos which at one point were practically treated as the gold standard of evidence. It's still easy to find people who have fallen for photoshopped images, but it's also easy to find people expressing doubts and insisting they can "tell by the pixels". Sometimes even legitimate photos get accused of being…

The other side of this is that ai tools are being treat like magic to the point that people are denying well documented events happened at all, such as the shooting of Charlie Kirk - conspiracies abound!

Also bizarrely a subsection of the population seems to be really into blatantly ai generated images, just hop onto Facebook and see for yourself. I wonder if it has something to do with whatever monkey brain things makes people download apps with a thumbnail of a guy shouting or watch videos that have a thumbnail of a face with its mouth open, since ai generated photos seem very centralized around a single face making a strange expression.

Re: LLM policy?

#60

I think everything has a growing problem with LLM/AI generated content. Emails, blog posts, news articles, research papers, grant applications, business proposals, music, art, pretty much everything you can think of. There’s already more human produced content in the world than anyone could ever hope to consume, we don’t need more from AI.

In some ways I'm starting to enjoy this. Do you remember the 419 scams? 'Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince named Michael Jordan. Give me $50 so I can buy some chemicals to clean a bunch of money I secretly stowed away and I'll send you $5000.' People actually used to fall for that. Of course some people probably still would (and a lot more certainly gets blocked by spam blockers) but I think overall society grew less substan…

I personally know people who look down upon people who use LLMs to write code. There is a lot of hate in some of senior developers that I talk to. I don't know if this growing tendency to be suspicious of AI usage is good or bad. For example, towards the final semester of my bachelors degree, my algorithms class started reporting students for academic misconduct because they the TAs started assuming that all the optimal solutions to assignment problems were written by LLMs. In fact, several classmates started purposely writing sub-optmial solutions so that the TAs at least grade them without any prejudice.

I worry that because LLM slop also tends to be so well presented, it might compel software developers to start writing shabby code and documentation on purpose to make it appear human.

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