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We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

archestra.ai

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Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#91

Post by dimgl »

godelski wrote: post #86
rglullis wrote: post #63

'I will take "problems that could be easily be solved by implementing a Pfand system" for $200, Alex.' Seriously. Just ask for a US$10 deposit for the each PR. If the PR is accepted (not even merged, just accepted as "this is a good effort"), give it back. Hell, give double the amount for good effort and you got yourself a cheap way to attract good contributors. Best case, bots will balk at the payment. Worst case, t…

This sounds like a great idea until you think about it for more than 30 seconds. Similar to most "it's so easy, you just" ideas. Seriously, chill, then think about how you'd implement it. Then think how it'd go wrong. Then think about how to fix those problems. Repeat until you realize there's a better solution or until you solve the problem without making it overly convoluted. More often than not the former is the b…

This is an overly negative response to a genuine solution. There are a million reasons you shouldn't do X or Y.

More than likely GitHub would have to maintain their own internal wallet solution for this, which is a big engineering lift. But we're all just having a discussion.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#92

Post by igsomething »

rglullis wrote: post #63

'I will take "problems that could be easily be solved by implementing a Pfand system" for $200, Alex.' Seriously. Just ask for a US$10 deposit for the each PR. If the PR is accepted (not even merged, just accepted as "this is a good effort"), give it back. Hell, give double the amount for good effort and you got yourself a cheap way to attract good contributors. Best case, bots will balk at the payment. Worst case, t…

Then people from a sanctioned countries are blocked from open source, or worse, you have to explain to the bank and/or the government why you sent 20USD to someone in Venezuela.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#93

Post by drum55 »

infinitifall wrote: post #54

Is the solution to everything simply more catgirls [1]? Proof-of-work was, after all, about countering email spam. PR spam is but the latest in that long tradition. 1- https://anubis.techaro.lol

Proof of work doesn’t work here same as it doesn’t work for email. The effort to mint a valid PoW is always going to put the legitimate user at a disadvantage, whatever the implementation is. Someone with an incentive to spam will always be able to do it faster, more efficiently than you.

You can’t submit a PR because your laptop is too slow? Rent some hash rate from someone, and now you’ve just made a system of paying botnet owners to be able to make a typo fix on a github repo. HashCash was never used in the real world for a reason, it sounds cute but the incentives are so insane as to only work in a vacuum where you assume everyone isn’t cheating.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#94

Post by bluGill »

rglullis wrote: post #63

'I will take "problems that could be easily be solved by implementing a Pfand system" for $200, Alex.' Seriously. Just ask for a US$10 deposit for the each PR. If the PR is accepted (not even merged, just accepted as "this is a good effort"), give it back. Hell, give double the amount for good effort and you got yourself a cheap way to attract good contributors. Best case, bots will balk at the payment. Worst case, t…

Why should I trust you to give me my deposit back?

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#95

Post by smaudet »

krupan wrote: post #78

This is what we get for telling everyone how amazing AI is at writing code. It started with the people selling AI and for some reason tons of independent developers, some quite well respected in our field, piled on. Facebook now laying people off and saying it's because AI is just so good adds more fuel to the fire. Now you have a bunch of people fully confident that their AI friend is pumping out amazing code and su…

> and for some reason tons of independent developers

Cowboy coders got a virtual cowgirl coder and sold it to everyone, hmm, maybe... (respected or not, solo devs don't always have the requisite skills to not be a cowboy, either due to lack of experience or lack of innate skill)

I don't know that I completely buy this narrative, though. There has been a strong, top-down push for this since the "beginning".

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#96

Post by bradley13 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #62

Sounds kind of weird that the blog post complains about `poisoning the conversation with pointless "implementation plans"` when literally they ask for that, after attaching $900 USD bounty to a very under-specified issue, and even replies with "Do you have an implementation plan in mind?" to some of the first "attempters". Sounds like they got exactly what they'd been asking for, and even before LLMs if you pulled so…

It's fine for developers to provide a plan, even if it gets rejected. The problem comes when every script kiddie figures AI has made them into a developer.

Imagine you want to get a doctor's opinion, or maybe a couple of opinions. But a zillion AI-amateurs have registered themselves as doctors. How do you separate wheat from the chaff?

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#97

Post by rtdq »

smaudet wrote: post #90
rtdq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst case is that someone loses out on $10, no? How does this work if the maintainer is the swindler?

I don't think that is a (very realistic) concern. AI is slop, the problem is not that the real contributors are struggling to get PRs merged. The bigger issue being, raising the bar to students who may have otherwise had productive careers (but education is a general issue, where the students don't even yet recognize they are being scammed).

I don't follow, and I'd be concerned that this opens up a cottage industry of bots generating plausible looking repositories that unwitting contributors would attempt to contribute to. We already know that bots are astroturfing repos to generate overinflated star counts. I'd say the least crap option here is to honeypot PR contributions from bots

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#98

Post by rglullis »

godelski wrote: post #80
rglullis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Once a PR is rejected, contact from that bot is blocked. No appeals.

So I pay $10 when your bot fucks up? That's called theft. And for what, one banana?

Obviously, the triage should be done by a human and not automated.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#99

Post by zarzavat »

rglullis wrote: post #63

'I will take "problems that could be easily be solved by implementing a Pfand system" for $200, Alex.' Seriously. Just ask for a US$10 deposit for the each PR. If the PR is accepted (not even merged, just accepted as "this is a good effort"), give it back. Hell, give double the amount for good effort and you got yourself a cheap way to attract good contributors. Best case, bots will balk at the payment. Worst case, t…

What? No. A PR is me giving my time to the project. I don't get anything out of it except the warm feeling of having helped out. If I have to pay money to submit a PR then I'm going to play video games instead.

Re: We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag

#100

Post by catlifeonmars »

stronglikedan wrote: post #67
sebastiansm7 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Elo not ELO. Elo is not an acronym. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

From what I've seen in the comments, it's definitely ELO, if not through ubiquity alone. Happens to the best of 'em!

Elo is nicer as it gives a nod to the inventor, no?
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