Based on recent comments this feels like a discussion we should have. So…topic, basically.
I’m not looking to be chief noisemaker on this, but I stand by what I wrote in !privacy and what’s in my post history.
https://lemmy.ml/post/48724623/26190950
Let’s have at; do we want a [AI] and [NOT AI] tag. Why or why not?
What does it mean for a project to deserve the [AI] tag? This matters, because you may have a lot of projects where a developer may think “no” and someone else thinks “yes”. Some examples from my day job:
- Developer used AI to understand part of the codebase and suggest ways to accomplish goal. Developer incorporated that suggestion, though using their own knowledge deviated from AI’s suggestion in parts. Developer wrote the code themselves. Is this project [AI] or [NOT AI]?
- Developer used AI to review existing (human-written) code for quality and security purposes. AI noticed some issues and proposed fixes. Developer reviewed and accepted them. Is this project [AI]?
- Developer knew they wanted to implement a feature, and while implementing it there was a boilerplate function. Developer asked AI to write this function, manually reviewed it, confirmed it worked, and added it to the codebase. Is this project [AI]?
In these examples the developer carefully reviews the AI’s output, which I think distinguishes it from vibe-coded slop, which at least is what I want to ignore.
It’s also worth noting that an open-source project may receive and incorporate a well-written contribution where the human developer used AI carefully like this. Unless they disclosed that they used AI, it may be unknowable to the project maintainers whether their project is [AI] or not, depending on how you define it. What tag should these projects use?
@festus @selfhosted Excellent examples. What the tag [AI] conveys is not what you really need to know, which is the quality of the code (component/unit), unit testing, and so forth. I assume there is some acceptance testing done at the project level. The human who submits the code must understand that flaws in their code is their responsibility, just as those who contribute/maintain the project are responsible at the system level. It is both an objective and reputational process. Does it really matter what tools are used if the work product passes the test, verification and validation criteria? Sloppy code is not unique to AI tools.
I’d prefer a [HUMAN] tag for projects without A.I. But yes, tags would be welcome.
Either ban vibe coded projects entirely or ban vibe coded projects that have less than a year of history. If allowing “mature” vibe coded projects, require the tag.
Spaces like this become so much worse when “i made this last week look at the shiny ui 🎉🎉🎉🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀” projects that will never ever see any form of maintenance are allowed.
I hate it when the default state is turned into the negative. Every time I have to specify “unsweet tea” I feel the sands of my lifeforce slipping away.
I agree with others who said AI tag for AI helped projects, no tags for normal projects.
I think you might need both for the tag bot to work properly but dunno.
I think the reality is that people will downvote the AI posts, and that will incentivise people to not disclose it or outright lie. The other thing that came to mind here is the fact that I’ve been trying to set my RSS reader up to not show me anything if AI is mentioned. It turns out that I haven’t been able to do that because it couldn’t discern “AI” from “fair”, “pair”, “air” etc. but the sentiment was there because I’m sick of hearing about it, and I imagine a lot of people are. This could cause readers or whatever else is configured to block AI content to block the non-ai content too, just because it’s mentioned. Additionally it does bring AI to the forefront, which doesn’t help with that AI fatigue.
Hmm, can I RegEx this?
[\s-]AI[-,\.\s]This is assuming it’s not at the start of the article.
EDIT: Thinking about it 2 more seconds, this might actually be more precise:
[\W_]AI[\W_]Doing more, like
\WAIwould filter words like “ailment”. Haven’t found a word matchingAI\Wyet, but I’m careful atm.You know, now you mention it, I haven’t tested to see if the filter functionality of my reader will accept a regular expression. I’ll give it a go later, thanks!
Ironically…ai is probably an excellent tool to prefetch your content, perform sentiment analysis and then sanitise the content to your liking.
😂 yes indeed!
Me: I’m sick of hearing about AI. It’s very existence brings me down. It’s bad for the environment, bad for code, bad for mental illness, bad for humans.
AI: Sorry to interrupt, but have you considered using AI to help with this matter?
Legitimately, I agree it would be a good use, but I will be sticking with non-AI solutions regardless.
Hey, even Che Guvera wore a Rolex. :)
PS: I think you’re circling something though - people are objecting to the idea of what they think AI is, based on emotional appeal. It’s a category error.
As in - you know damn well that the correct tool for sentiment analysis is an AI but you’d rather avoid using it because … whatever.
It’s that “because whatever” I’m pointing at, because right now it’s unexamined and at best scores you a pyrrhic victory. Sentence transformers, rankers and re-rankers are AI, the right tool for the job and you won’t use them because… Ai bad.
(You in the general sense, not you you).
“Small,” non-generative, BERT-like models, would probably be more appropriate.
Anthropic does sentiment analysis with regex in Claude Code though ¯\(ツ)/¯
Because use of AI is bad for me. YMMV.
I’m midly curious as to how.
How would (say) you using Qwen 3.5 4B be bad for you (specifically) in this case?
Qwen’s open weights, already trained, runs locally on your rig, doesn’t leak PII to the cloud and does the job.
Surely if AI discussion in feeds is causing grief, anything that removes that for you (your stated intention) is “good” for you?
I find that whenever I have used AI to find a solution, I have forfeited learning, so I avoid it completely so that I can learn about the thing that AI would have otherwise shortcut for me. Regarding this specific example, while it may or may not be the case that AI is the best tool for sentiment analysis, it’s not the best or most efficient tool for keyword filtering, and keyword filtering is all I’d really need. In the event that I cared enough about the filtering to find or build a solution, it wouldn’t be with AI for this reason, but also because of the aforementioned reasons. Even if they’re not applicable to this very scenario, I’d rather not involve myself in the technology at all if I can help it.
Can we talk shop? I don’t want to come across as badgering you if you’re happy to put a pin in it, but I think this is a bad take. Like, if you’re going to try and solve this with Regex soup and spite, it’s going to hurt.
What happens if Codex, Claude, Cursor, LLM or phrases like “machine learning”, “generative ai” etc are mentioned?
Or when someone wants to have a discussion like this?
\bAI\b will miss almost all of it.
Note: I have no stake in you using or not using AI, an I am not trying to convert you to the church of Latter day Aiology. I am simply trying to [
]avoid doing real work[] chat.
No tag for not AI.
Only AI tags needed, which helps remind people that slop should be warned against. We don’t need to warn for slop free apps
But wouldn’t that be far more useful? Many people seem to be looking for projects who don’t ever touch AI. Devs who use a [No AI] tag show that they follow the same agenda and most likely will not change their opinion on the next release.
No, because the absence of the tag indicates it’s free of AI
Or that the author didn’t know about the rule?
That’s why we have mods
Or…we could make it easier for them and make the use of the tag a conscious decision indicating something instead of relying on the mod’s voluntary work to correct for an implied meaning.
We could make it easier for mods by reporting articles to the mod.
Even better: We could mandate every post to put [Moderate This] at the end if they don’t follow the rules.
I feel it’s a little dangerous, because it would give a false sense of security in [no-ai] projects.
We have all seen tons of projects 100% written without any AI that are very poorly coded and full of insecurities.
I personally don’t think so. For me it would be an indicator that the project is new, doesn’t have a lot of support and just looks shiny.
Or you don’t allow AI
@curbstickle@anarchist.nexus - as per your suggestion, here is the AI tags discussion, which I imagine you’ve been eyeballing.
I don’t know where this leaves the community, nor how many responders are part of the community vs lookie loos. I would have put up a staw poll but that likely wouldn’t have helped much, signal:noise wise.
As the mod, do you have a read on all this or a preferred direction going forward?
As I already mentioned, I won’t be putting anything up for the week as the other rule gets closed out to not inundate, so do not expect any action this week.
That said, it absutely confirmed my expectations, and I’ll be looking into some automod options and discussing with the .world team to find out if there are any known issues with them, so that a few options can be presented in the next sticky.
So state of play / preview of coming attractions - yes to tags, once tagged, cannot complain about said tagged content. Formal sticky etc next week.
PS: I took a look at r/selfhosted - their bot seems to delete ALL new project posts and requires user to appeal / resubmit / verify directly. I think that’s problematic (and ironic, if you think about it - you’re trying to litigate ai/no ai with a bot) but not my circus, not my monkeys.
I would love to see an [AI] tag, so I can easily hide it. Coupled with temporary bans in case of missing disclosure it would really sanitize the community
A mandatory [AI] tag? Sure.
A [NOT AI] tag? No, that’s the default. Why normalise AI bullshit even further?
But mandating [NOT AI] means that people have to go out of their way to declare their work is AI-free. It requires active lying rather than lying by omission—I think there are a non-zero number of people who would be inclined to omit an AI tag but would not want to go as far as explicitly lying about their work being AI-free.
Agreed. “Failed to disclose” isn’t condemned as harshly as “Blatantly lied”, even if it should be. So obfuscating a project’s AI usage may be seen as less risky than being upfront about it.
A responsibly transparent project should advertise itself as AI-free if it truly is.
Then failure to disclose can be condemned, for instance by temporary bans
I think [AI] tags would be good. That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty. [NOT AI] seems redudant since we’ve already defined [AI], but again for quick filtering purposes, I see no harm in both.
Having both an [AI] and a [not AI] tag allows immediate differentiation between a not AI post and a did not tag post.
But it’s annoying. Non AI should be default, AI has to be marked.
Edit: whoops, I thought this was a different community. Ignore me.
~~Yes, but no. [Not AI] tags would be just as much for your benefit as it would be for the poster’s. Until they become official tags in a mandatory field to post, someone who cuts corners is going to skip reading the rules and post without a tag. Or even if the onus were only on the “AI” posters, then they’ll miss or forget to check the box, select the tag, etc.
Therefore, you’ll want to be able to sort by [Not AI], and then safely assume that anything else probably isn’t worth your time. Additionally, someone who uses AI and then intentionally abuses the [Not AI] tag could be assumed to have lied about anything else in their project, and should not be considered a trustworthy creator or worthwhile poster.~~
Therefore, you’ll want to be able to sort by [Not AI]
No, I don’t. I’d rather have no tags at all and some AI posts in there than every post needing annoying tags in the title. Also not every post is related to a specific piece of software
Oh, I just noticed what community I was commenting in. Yes, you’re completely right, then. It’s more of a helpful little tag for those who are interested than a filter for different types of creators.
I’d assumed, obviously incorrectly and with the wrong context, that you were expressing anti-AI views, so I was trying to communicate how not fully standardizing (labeling) the data (posts) would affect you from your, once again, improperly assumed perspective.
Oh, I hold anti AI views :-) Just not so fierce that I want to be warned of every mention
I want the subreddit to be at least 95% NOT AI, but without completely excluding AI content (which must be tagged) and I don’t want to see everything tagged “[NOT AI]” because that’s genuinely obnoxious.
I understand that this is maybe not realistically achievable given the technical limitations within the Lemmy platform, but those limitations are not going to make such an implementation any less obnoxious, even if it is implemented that way for my benefit.
I would rather trust the mods and downvoters to clean up not-tagged or dishonestly Not-AI-tagged AI content, personally.
Yeah, I thought I was in one of the programming communities (we call them communities vs subreddits, which is why they’re prepended with “c/” instead of “r/”), which is why I was being so anal about creators and their values/meticulousness.
Obviously, for a community that’s often full of people posting “look what I found,” or “here’s my advice,” I was proposing far too much rigor that would absolutely kill the mood here.
Reasonable.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
I think tags could be alright but only if this is not allowed, it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
it is unreasonable to ask people to disclose something just so others can shit on them for it.
I totally dig what your saying. I’m not a downvoter period. In my short time here at Lemmy, AI assisted projects are going to get shit on one way or another. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. I think the narrative of this thread is to attempt to make things conducive to all users. I personally do not outright reject AI assisted projects. My main concern is if I spin up a container and it turns out to be a doughnut. AI assisted or no, unless you speak multi code languages fluently, you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
you are taking a risk either way. You are placing your trust in the dev and the few that can read code.
There is definitely a trust issue and a need for ways of conveying and building trust in smaller software projects. I think a much better solution there would be discussions about the code and how it works that aren’t hostile interrogations with foregone conclusions in pursuit of a broader anti-AI agenda. If someone just put a lot of effort into making something the details of that process should be on their mind, it should be possible to make them more accessible to people and convey that there is non-artificial understanding behind the project. Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
Automatic hostility and suspicion makes those kinds of conversations harder and less likely.
You’re preaching to the choir but I will give an amen.
That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty.
good lord, who does this? why waste the thumb energy? seems like a dick move… it’s easier to do no harm. crappy posts will die by themselves.
Again, I dig what you are saying, and I have a similar mind set. However, there is a strong faction of very vocal anti-AI anything, here at Lemmy. Both sides of the argument about AI coded projects or AI in general do have some valid points. However, in my estimation, and as I’ve said before, it’s 2026 and AI is here to stay. It is a good assumption that any project within the last 5 years or so has been at least AI assisted, if not outright vibe coded. Even updates to long standing projects now have AI involvement.
Yes, to me, the option to exercise your mouse wheel to glide over posts you are uninterested in, seems very obvious.
Having the tags? Sure.
Making them mandatory? Only if we have 1.- an actual process to determine whether a tag is incorrectly applied (up to a respectable level of confidence) and 2.- an adequate, *enforceable+ punishment for infringers.
Yes, please. I don’t like seeing a “neat handy application” only to find that 95% of it was coded by Claude, the fact of which is either buried, or not even mentioned until you visit the repo and see that it’s the top contributor.
Generally accompanied by crickets to questions a out the project and on some cases some large list of vulnerabilities on some projects that got popular enough.
