[META] Should AI disclosure tags [AI], [NOT AI] be mandated when sharing projects?

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.

A mandatory [AI] tag? Sure.

A [NOT AI] tag? No, that's the default. Why normalise AI bullshit even further?

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.

I absolutely don't want Meta Tags in every titles. It makes reading the list of posts super annoying.

I also don't feel the need to know whether there's some AI commits, but I do want to know if a project is largely vibe coded. I don't have an objective metric on where this line could be drawn.

I think the status quo is kinda fine. Some commenter will point it out and will get enough upvotes to be visible on first glance. It's not perfect but good enough for me.

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

I feel like this could lead to discrimination and prejudice against ai users. It should have been implemented years ago.

Just ban AI already

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.

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?

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. Anything made, posted, modified, or output by AI should be tagged as such, always, without exception.

I think that unless you have some way to enforce accuracy, it's meaningless and AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.

An AI bot operator isn't going to tag their material as [AI], more likely than not they'd attempt to use [NOT AI].

I'd also point out that while lemmy doesn't (yet) support hashtags, any "tagging" would probably benefit from using the existing method using a #tag.

Ultimately, you need to ask yourself, is undeclared AI that goes undetected by the community a problem, or the new "normal"?

I'll note that I'm not a proponent of Assumed Intelligence and think that when the bubble bursts we're going to be in a world of hurt, but with a little luck the billionaires will have lost their shirts in the process.

Absolutely.

Please do! It's always my first question when reading new projects.

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.

See, the problem with this is there’s no objective standard for validating whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So we can impose conventions that say you must tag something as being generated in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean that people are going to actually be forthcoming with the community.

This is a problem that we’re going to have to deal with not just when we’re talking about our self hosted builds, but almost anything that is mediated through a screen. So, if we can figure it out for here, I’d suggest that we tell everybody shortly thereafter; about it because it‘ll solve a lot of problems, in a lot of different places.

Bonus points if whatever we come up with can actually be self hosted.

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.

/r/selfhosted has an automod comment that creates a place to disclose how genAI/LLMs were used in the project and the post. I like that.

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

Yes please.

I agree with others who said AI tag for AI helped projects, no tags for normal projects.

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.

If you see this seal:

You know the project is golden. It uses a no-ai policy specifically.

https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/

We should be pushing projects to adopt this policy (or similar) to have a very clear indicator when something is not slop.

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 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, 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.

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?

I know nothing about running a Lemmy instance, so I thought I'd ask. Does the Lemmy framework allow something like this:

::: spoiler spoiler :::

If so, maybe that'd be less annoying to some. The screenshot is from selfh.st.

yes.

always yes.

What's the threshold for a tag?

Just add context as a top level comment or in the body text area. Someone can come in to clarify if the poster is missing it.

Even for a poster sometimes it's not obvious if there is any AI in the project. Example: Lutris, dev said they are adding Claude commits and will be scrubbing mentions of the tool from PRs. Sometimes AI is discussed but rejected.

It's easy to tell when a whole project has been vibecoded, but the grey zone of an existing project that may or may not have had slopcode added, is tougher for posters to discern.

Software has gone many decades without the need of LLM assistance, I vote to tag “Ai” and “Non-Ai” assisted posts.

+1

Or you don't allow AI

If you make a tag for AI, what's the purpose of making everything people want to see explicitly say (not AI)?

People that want to use that shit, need to learn to be upfront about and realistic about how the vast majority of people view AI produced.... Well, ai anything.

Good/bad content is the same whether it’s AI or not, plus those using AI would probably just lie and say it’s not AI.

I think we should have an AI tag, and "not AI" should be the default (otherwise we add "non-" versions of every tag and post titles are a list of what something isn't instead of what it is).

Imo, a lot of the tools here have a high security requirement. Either because they handle personal/private information and/or are exposed to the public internet. AI use is a red flag to me that the developer hasn't properly considered all the security implications of their product.

Yes

Yes, it should. Just make it [slop] vs. no tag. Actual content shouldn't define itself by the abscence of shit.

I would support those tags. Does Lemmy support some equivalent of post flairs that can be filtered?

I'd prefer a [HUMAN] tag for projects without A.I. But yes, tags would be welcome.

I'm in favor of heavy AI users adding an [AI] tag to their posts. I don't think we have to worry too much about AI users trying to pass their work as organic. Almost all AI users I know proudly and annoying shout about how great the AI is. So I think only a minority of AI users would try to hide their AI usage.

I think we should encourage users to add [AI], but also make it voluntary. We need people to complain in the post when someone doesn't add the [AI] tag, but they should have. I'm guessing here, but I think the more people complain about the missing [AI] tag, the more likely the project used more AI. I'm guessing if the AI usage is low, like 1 or 2 commits out of 1000, then not as many people would complain.

@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?

It feels like there's been an increasing flood of AI slop projects, with varying degrees of monetization / donations. I think it'll become a huge problem if we don't have at a minimum very strict rules around AI generated slop projects. I think a mandatory tag with penalty of removal is a good bottom floor, in addition to the recent community participation activity % requirements for promoting monetized projects, which covers a good chunk of AI projects.

Then hopefully soon we can figure out as a community what to do to control the remaining volume of non-strongly-monetized AI slop projects if those are still too widespread, but having it labeled is absolutely needed transparency, and that'll still be difficult because lots of people seem to lie about not using AI.

I mean if you do it should be a required dropdown to post since its one or the other.

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."

Yes, [AI] should be mandatory. No need for the other one, that's just the standard.

Having the tags is nice, but I don't think mandating it is the way to go.

People who hate AI to the bitter end will use a [NOT AI] tag and signalize people who think alike that this status of the project will most likely never change.

Other people might happily tell everyone the used AI and use the respective tag as well.

But most people don't care and wouldn't use either. This also means that a project that currently uses no AI, but does not use the tag might do so in the future, which is also an important information - for the AI haters.

No - the rabid AI hate here is... ridiculous. This only feeds it.

I hate python. Just hate it. Should I require that everyone posting indicates what language they use so that I can properly hate on the python projects?

Besides - how are you defining "AI"? Used to help? Writes the entire thing? Used for auto-complete? Should we really be gatekeeping like this? In 10 years it'll become rare to find anything not using AI anyway. The rabid AI haters will always be around though.

I'd rather not even see whatever that [meta] tag thing is people keep using. I see it and instantly think Facebook and disregard anything that's said for obvious reasons.

but hey, add tags for everything more tags, use # also, and whatever other things. full the pages with tags upon tags so posts are annoying to read

I'd like tags for used electricity, or didn't use electricity. Also whether they used a computer. Maybe a tag for whether they had a friend help, or did it solo? Oh, I know, a tag for whether they consumed oxygen.