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AI Usage Policy

github.com

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Re: AI Usage Policy

#61

Post by postepowanieadm »

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…

If you are from poor society you can't afford to have shame. You either succeed or fail, again and again, and keep trying.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#62

Post by conartist6 »

weinzierl wrote: post #56
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…

"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.

Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.

Tit for tat

Re: AI Usage Policy

#63

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

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 would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.

i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).

Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.

Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".

The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#64

Post by senko »

On a tangent: the origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature. That might have been great when GitHub started, but nowadays many use it as portfolio padding and/or social proof.

"This person contributed to a lot of projects" heuristic for "they're a good and passionate developer" means people will increasingly game this using low-quality submissions. This has been happening for years already.

Of course, AI just added kerosene to the fire, but re-read the policy and omit AI and it still makes sense!

A long term fix for this is to remove the incentive. Paradoxically, AI might help here because this can so trivially be gamed that it's obvious it's not longer any kind of signal.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#65

Post by 0x696C6961 »

flexagoon wrote: post #33
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…

Keep in mind that many people also contribute to big open source projects just because they believe it will look good ok their CV/GitHub and help them get a job. They don't care about helping anyone, they just want to write "contributed to Ghostty" in their application.

From my experience, it's not about helping anyone or CV building. I just ran into a bug or a missing feature that is blocking me.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#66

Post by evilhackerdude »

sounds reasonable to me. i've been wondering about encoding detailed AI disclosure in an SBOM.

on a related note: i wish we could agree on rebranding the current LLM-driven never-gonna-AGI generation of "AI" to something else… now i'm thinking of when i read the in-game lore definition for VI (Virtual Intelligence) back when i played mass effect 1 ;)

Re: AI Usage Policy

#67

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

postepowanieadm wrote: post #61
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…

If you are from poor society you can't afford to have shame. You either succeed or fail, again and again, and keep trying.

In other news, wet roads cause rain.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#68

Post by anonymous908213 »

weinzierl wrote: post #56
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…

"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 norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.

The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#69

Post by Ntrails »

alansaber wrote: post #11

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

> "Pull requests [] must have been fully verified with human use."

I would expect this is entirely uncontroversial and the AI qualifier redundant.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#70

Post by vanderZwan »

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…

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 to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.

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