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?
No, because it’s about the what, and with or without AI is the how.
We don’t have disclosures “built on a Linux/Windows/macOS machine” or “built using IntelliJ/Eclipse” so why is it important what tool was used to do something?
What I am curious about is why this should be a negative for anyone, devs who want to use AI get an easy way to filter out the people who will kick back against it, the people who will kick back against it get a quieter existence, Lemmy should be happy.
I keep seeing how having to categorise will provide a perverse incentive to not disclose and I guess I don’t understand why that would be the case.
It’s not like they are tricking people into buying these free programs, it’s not like they are soliciting contributions from other devs (they have an AI for that), and its not like there is some sort of score being kept (besides earning some sort of credibility on Github as a pro-AI developer through that star thing I guess).
So what would be the motivation to try to trick the community into embracing these sorts of projects? Open and enthusiastic disclosure and a community push to simply move on if you find that style of development distasteful would work better for everyone.
I have walked away from using a project that was developed with AI and I didn’t feel the need to slam the developer for it, I just moved on. They didn’t betray my trust because they don’t owe me anything, and I didn’t unfairly judge their work because I don’t owe them anything. Everyone’s a winner.
But that’s just my humble opinion.
I, like other respondents, don’t care if AI is used, I only care if AI was trusted.
AI is a tool to enhance a workflow, and as long as a skilled human is reviewing it and fixing it, fine.
We would be better off defining a programmer’s project vs an ametuer hour vibe coded monstrosity, but that won’t ever really happen.
I think this is a major over generalisation that misses the main point of why people don’t want AI projects. The real questions are:
- Is this slop?
- Does a human understand all of this code?
- Did a human design this deliberately or is it completely derivative and uninspired?
- Will a human take responsibility for bugs that come up?
- Did a human write the docs?
- Will this be maintained or just a weekend project with no substance?
- Does this actually serve a purpose?
Idk how to address these things really. I could see the AI tag going both ways, but I do think it’s painting with too broad a brush.
Software has gone many decades without the need of LLM assistance, I vote to tag “Ai” and “Non-Ai” assisted posts.
+1
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?
Sir, this is Lemmy. If you use AI in any way, you are clearly in league with the devil and deserve to burn.
I agree with all your points, BTW.
I posted this discussion because I wanted to explore both guard rails AND nuance around that sort of work flow, particularly for our new mod (and in light of several other scattered convos).
A lot of the diffuse FuckAI Lemmy crowd have poor understanding of code workflow. “AI bad” knee jerks so hard it’s going to dislocate something.
I’ve tried to argue this point, because roughly… ooh…100% of code gen touches AI something. So, do we tag everything?
What people really want is a [SLOP] tag, which is both lazy / not doing your own due diligence and impossible to implement.
In hindsight, I think the pragmatic approach is ultimately the workable (albeit blunted) one. Have the ai tag. It flattens everything but if stops brigading and slop, that’s the least amount of moderation work.
I appreciate you posting btw.
Sir, this is Lemmy. If you use AI in any way, you are clearly in league with the devil and deserve to burn.
Bahahahahahaha!
@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.
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.
This is a rule that could actually be implemented and would help with the slop vs not-slop judgement call
I mean if you do it should be a required dropdown to post since its one or the other.
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.
YES.
But also, we can tell. Random front-end/dashboard with an incomprehensible tech stack and feature list ? Always AI.
Y’all sound like : “Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance.”
Exactly. So if it sounds like a turbo encabulator, why so we need a tag?
Because I’m sure some of them make reasonable souding projects, but I still don’t want to use them either way.
Tell me your project is trash at the outset, I’ll find out anyway by reading the code, you’re doing both of us a favour.
Tags don’t protect against that tho , if applied honestly. And humans aren’t immune from making human slop all on their own.
Spelunking the repo is 100% the answer if that’s the threat model.
The tag / no tag thing can only be part of the due diligence. I argue it (at best) is neutral to that end and at worst, completely flattens the reality of code gen in 2026. Nearly 100% of code gen now touches AI somewhere.
Turbo encabulator style announcement is a much louder and more useful signal, and we already get that for free. Tag may actually end up blunting that.
No, because every developer who’s worth anything these days uses AI. What you don’t want is vibe-coded stuff, where the creator hasn’t even looked at the code, or barely understood it. Although having said that, vibe-coded projects can be good for prototyping.
I’d prefer a [HUMAN] tag for projects without A.I. But yes, tags would be welcome.
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 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.It won’t work. You need a text classifier to do sentiment analysis, because “ai” is a concept, not just “ai”. TinyBERT or MiniLM I reckon could do it or if you really want to cut off your nose to spite your face, code the equivalent in python from scratch.
Say what you want about M$, but TinyBERT / MiniLM are awesome.
Smart play would be for the RSS reader to have that as optional plug in module, IMHO.
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.
