[META] Should AI disclosure tags [AI], [NOT AI] be mandated when sharing projects?
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?
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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 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, it should. Just make it [slop] vs. no tag. Actual content shouldn't define itself by the abscence of shit.
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.
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?
Some people have serious ethical and quality concerns about AI usage in code in a way that's just irrelevant to the OS and IDE used to code it.
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:
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.
I'm in the process of launching a new business as a single dev, and I want to be upfront about my use of AI, but I notice as soon as I mention any LLM, most people assume what I've built is "vibe coded" without even looking at the applications themselves.
I spent almost two months just setting up the devops side of things before I even considered publishing. Feedback buttons in the apps automatically open issues on my Forgejo, push mirrors to GitHub and Codeberg, and I do weekly progress reports internally (I stopped posting to Lemmy after people felt spammed and now I just post on the site blog)
I'm just not sure how to make it easy to tell that I'm actually putting my heart and soul into building software that should help people.
If curious: https://circuitforge.tech/
I looked at your site. Realistically I think we're talking about two different things here. There are tools which were programmed with the assistance of AI and then there are AI powered tools. Your stuff is clearly the latter.
I think ai powered tools are a lot harder to sell people on right now. The ai powered area is where I see by far the most shovelware/slop.
To be blunt, when I see a new ai powered tool I assume several things:
I know this isn't true of every ai powered app but it's true of 99% of them right now. I really have no idea how you could convince people yours isnt slop.
One idea might be to stop using the term "AI". It's a buzzword with strong connotations. Some people hear it and think "gold rush", some people think "slop" or "data center".
Personally I would be a lot more likely to take a project seriously if they used the term "LLM" or "machine learning" to describe what powers the product.
Also, I don't see anything that looks like obvious AI art to me but DONT USE AI ART. AI art is already terrible on its own but when I see AI art mixed with AI text telling me about an AI powered app I'm 1000% done giving my attention.
For sure on the art. I'm a graphic artist by education and I'm already working with another full-time artist on the application logos. When I make enough I'm planning to hire a proper web developer for the frontend/web design as that's onc area I do lean pretty heavy on the LLM's for assistance.
Funny you should mention the AI vs LLM labeling as I much prefer to call them LLM's or "models", but I'm trying to keep it accessible for non-technical people. I think I'll go back through and rename though.
Also most of the tools are deterministic, with the LLM's filling in gaps where there needs to be some amount of probabilistic interaction, like figuring out what you could cook given only the ingredients in your pantry, or rewriting a resume 26 million ways to satisfy the ATS filters.
If you don't want to use those features, nothing forcing you. They're useful for tracking and organizing without the LLM at all.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Software has gone many decades without the need of LLM assistance, I vote to tag “Ai” and “Non-Ai” assisted posts.
+1
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 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.
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 [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.
Honestly. I was fully on board with this until you brought that up. Yea that just 180'd my opinion on if it should be tagged significantly.
I don't want something to be tagged to be able to allow people to mass downvote it or hide it from sight, that's not productive to anyone. I wanted the tag to be able to filter it out when I didn't want to see it, but be able to see it if I felt I wanted to. Allowing for mass downvote on it will significantly hinder that.
I commiserate, but they are going to get downvoted one way or another
Yea but a tag system will allow it to be seen from outside the community. a general requirement in the body of the post of disclosing if AI was used and how I think would go a long way better in the long run, and requires the person to have entered the post and read it first.
I think I'm leaning more towards that style instead. if something interests me I can join it read it and if its AI and I don't want to see it I can go elsewhere, that requires people to put bare amount of effort instead of just seeing a [AI] tag from all[/active/hot] (idk what the actual lemmy endpoint is I use tess) and being like "oh ai downvote"
I get what you are saying. The downvoting doesn't bother me a bit. You can downvote me in to the stone age and I wouldn't give a shit. The curb stomping, anger, and animosity directed at anything AI tho, I think is out of hand. Every forum I've ever been in has a Rule 1. Few live up to that creed. I don't say this from any moral high ground or superiority whatsoever, but I find it a character flaw not to be able to control yourself as an adult and think 'Yeah I'm staunchly anti-AI. I have very, very strong opinions of it's usage in any circumstance. However, there are 8.4 billion other people who might not share my disgust with AI so I'll just skip on to the next thread.' Agree to disagree in other words.
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.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.
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
Reasonable.
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.
the only way they could prevent that was to mandate that disclosure had to be in the post body somewhere and not the title, that way it only appears once someone opens the post. Mostly because some posts are visible from feeds other than subscribed which means that members would see it that are outside of the normal/average visitors here.
Honestly I think i would prefer that. Instead of requiring a tag, require AI disclosure on the project somewhere in the post body.
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.
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.
You're preaching to the choir but I will give an amen.
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.
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 mean if you do it should be a required dropdown to post since its one or the other.
I'd prefer a [HUMAN] tag for projects without A.I. But yes, tags would be welcome.
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?
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:
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.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.
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 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.
I find myself commenting three questions on any post about a new application somebody developed.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if all new app posts were required to answer these questions for their post. It doesn't discriminate, it just asks them to lay their cards on the table for everyone to see. The community can judge from there.
I don't necessarily disagree here, however there is always the edge case of a certain overly-vocal group being 100% anti-AI, and that any usage of AI is considered a crime against humanity.
I'm not part of that group per se, but I also want full disclosure. If you used AI to get things going and handled it yourself from there, that's one thing. Constant commits from Claude or whatever is a whole different bucket of shit I refuse to touch.
Yes, the crowd will point it out if the author didn't and you can decide what to make of it. It's probably discouraging to post slopware if you know you're in for a lot of criticism, I'm not sure if it's better or worse than being forced to flag it [AI].
I don’t disagree. Perhaps tags at the end of post titles rather than the beginning, or tags in the body of the post? I’m not sure what people use to filter these things and how those different options would effect usability.
I'd be fine with the end, but it'd probably be overlooked a lot. Given how long some of these posts are, they would probably be hidden these as well unless the post starts with [Disclaimer: this has mostly been vibe coded]
I feel like this could lead to discrimination and prejudice against ai users. It should have been implemented years ago.
To clarify...you're in favour of discrimination and prejudice against ai users?
I am as well.
Why's that?
Yes. They should be told to sit in the corner with a big cone shaped hat on like the old days.
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.
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.
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
Just ban AI already
This is a better plan.
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.
Please do! It's always my first question when reading new projects.
Absolutely.
Yes. Anything made, posted, modified, or output by AI should be tagged as such, always, without exception.
Including immich, home assistant, syncthing, docker....
Right? Right?
https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
Yes.
Yes.
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.
It depends.
There are a variety of indicators, some blatant like .cursorrules or CLAUDE.md and some key phrases that can be searched for. Unless they are actively working to hide references, these turn up in the overwhelming majority of the "not admitting but not denying" camp, or the just complete lack of disclosure.
There are also pretty solid indicators with commit logs that can be seen that are... unlikely to ever be a person.
What is getting harder is around the syntax detection tools and fragment detection tools. Some straight up rips from multiple codebases used to be obvious, but some tools are better at refactoring to make that discovery harder too.
Just to be candid, I am in no way anti-AI, I run and train my own models at home on my own hardware. Its a tool - a hammer is great for nailing a board to a wall, and an absolutely wrong choice for trying to screw together a cabinet, and I consider LLMs in the same camp.
If you're trying to vibe code a full project, its probably going to be a massive problem. If you're using it to parse some swagger and generate some hooks based on a prefix you defined for specific types without wanting to bother with smashing a script for the disparate types that can be easily detected with an llm... well, you're probably using it in a way I'd agree with.
Someone did mention an automod disclosure comment, which I really like the idea of, but would need to look into for use on the fediverse, I'm really not sure how good the automods out there are these days. Last time I checked they were.... not so great.
Or you don't allow AI
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.
/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.
That seems a lot more useful than binary tags. There's a wide spectrum between fully vibe-coded slop and hand-written with vim.
I wonder if the tools for lemmy are up to the task yet.... will have to look into it
Yes please.
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.
In addition to this, could we potentially make this a badge as well? https://brainmade.org/
That one is good, but it doesn’t have strict licensing restrictions like the SciActive one. Basically you have to follow the policy with the SciActive one, or you lose the license to use the seal.
Also, the SciActive one is specifically for software projects and covers the full software project explicitly.
Not that the Brain Made one is bad, it just fits a different use case (art, poetry, etc).
@[email protected] - 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?
@[email protected]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmHeP9Sve48
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.
Yeah that's not a method I'm interested in. A comment for OP to post under? Yep.
We'll see what works for folks next week.
yes.
always yes.
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.
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.
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.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.
Nominally, to avoid discrimination.
Thing is, I don't think people actually know how AI is used. At all. I think they know how AI is used to create slop.
And if they can already spot that, then why should things need to be tagged in the first place?
Do we want to see this?
Because, going by the letter of the law, there's a better than fair chance those projects have used AI - githubs own stats support that.
https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
97%. That's Github's number. In 2024.
I'll preface by saying I'm heavily against anything LLM generated and in a perfect world we'd have a full clean divide, just so my comment can be viewed in context.
I can't speak to them all but I would not count Jellyfin as coded by AI based on their standards. Yes, people have likely used LLM "tools" to write code they submit, but they expect a human to understand the code/request, understand it's purpose, what the code is doing, and explain the PR. A human is expected to fully own the work.
There's no way to enforce that as much as I wish, but I think it's a fair distinction between what would get an [AI] tag and and [Not AI] tag. Is a human expected to fully own and understand it, or is LLM code just accepted as is without full oversight and understanding.
Fair. So we're talking about slop - and to that I agree.
Next question then becomes: does [AI] meta-tag in any way help you discern slop from non slop? There are comments and proposals in favour of it.
The counter argument is - slop is obvious...and even if it isn't (and you're going stick the thing on your own rig), you should probably do your due diligence first...which will uncover issues.
At which point, a scarlett letter isn't going to do anything useful, and may unfairly tarnish projects.
That 97% stat was from 2 years ago. It's surely higher now.
I don't think [AI] tag works, for a number of reasons, as others have identified. But the topic keeps popping up here and there, so it's worth mulling over.
I refer to my original point I personally think anything LLM generated is slop and would certainly prefer to have literally any and every LLM generated code marked so I can avoid it. I do consider it all slop.
I also recognize that isn't how the world works unfortunately.
What would you qualify as discrimination?
Treating a category of content as inherently suspect based on how it was made, rather than whether it's any good. Having one tag [AI] puts a giant target on the post.
Thing is, the tag isn't neutral metadata, it's a flag.
And if 97% of projects have touched AI tooling in some form (who knows how deeply), you're not tagging outliers anymore, you're tagging the norm and implying everything untagged is the clean option.
That's not curation, that's a vibe-based blacklist.
I'm for "trust, but verify" - tagged or not. And the tagging won't work because 1) what is AI coded any more 2) do you need the tag to spot slop (which is what I think people mean by [AI])
Correct, that is the reason people would support an AI tag...
Because for the vast majority of people, they don't want AI anything
But...
1000% not discrimination
"vast majority don't want AI anything" is doing a lot of work there. Do they not want AI autocomplete in the IDE? AI-assisted translation? AI-generated test cases? Because if the line is "any AI involvement," the tag eats almost everything. If it's something narrower, we're back to: define the threshold.
This is a question about trust. That's a hard problem because it assumes X is innocent, Y is guilty. I'm saying X and Y are both equally guilty (or innocent) until proven otherwise and Z (slop) can be summarily executed.
I would like no AI anything, yes.
These conversations always go like "What do you mean no one wants AI? What about [crap that no one wants]? Checkmate atheists"
Totally. Why should anyone care about whether their clothes were made by slaves or prisoners or children? Only the tightness of the stitching and fabric is a valid measure of clothing's quality. 🙄
I'm sorry, what? Did you just equate AI use to actual child slavery?
I don't even know how to begin to respond to that.
Your analogy is irrational and frankly disgusting. Blocked.
I'll still respond for the sake of anyone else reading this. What I used was an analogy. I'm pointing out that you were dismissing the potential for moral objections to the use of AI. That is not the same as equating, but you probably know that.
You, like, other AI boosters are unable to fathom that folks' moral objections are both truly held and legitimate so you feign ignorance and shut down any critique by simultaneously clutching pearls and claiming that the thing we find morally repugnant is "inevitable." Happy to avoid future interactions. ❤
Might want to stop using the slop machines and look up these words: metaphor, analogy, example
Sure. And while I'm doing that, you might like to google Poe's Law.
Edit: you know what - I over reacted there and I apologise. Child slavery is a hot topic button and my head went to a weird place. I'm not going to uncook the chicken by deleting my post but I will admit I probably read it wrong at 5AM.
I stand by my read that their post was deliberately inflammatory framing, but it probably wasn't intended as a "so, when did you stop beating your wife".
Discrimination, that's hilarious.
Okay, let's say AI is as prevalent as you say it is. Make everyone disclose it, so that us so-called Luddites can see how ridiculous we are for trying to avoid it. And so that people who like AI software can more easily find it. Those people exist, right? Since AI is inevitable and all?
Oh you wanna snark?
Sure, let's just tag everything then. 97% of projects tagged. (I cited 2 sources to back that number up btw and I resent your implication that I made it up out of whole cloth).
Boom - done. You wanted all AI touched projects tagged, wish granted.
Hey, let's tag posts with [USES ELECTRICITY] too while we're at it. That'll be equally fucking useful.
People don't want an [AI] tag. They want a [SLOP] tag. Guess what - they can't have it.
Do you think slop merchants will tag their posts with [SLOP]? No?
Do you need a tag to detect slop code? No? Then what the fuck is the point of tagging anything?
[AI] and [SLOP] aren't in the same universe, and a tag can't distinguish them.
You're going to have people honestly trying to disclose AI use, only to get heckled, because Lemmy is so delightfully unbiased on anything AI.
Brilliant - that will do wonders for engagement.
So the alternative is to tiptoe around and pretend you're not using this amazing revolutionary technology that's so great?
No one has to do that for any other technology. Wonder why.
I would support those tags. Does Lemmy support some equivalent of post flairs that can be filtered?
Good question - and that's another problem. Not sure - can't see any in Voyager. Can you see any on your end?
I did a little digging, and apparently there is a plugin for Lemmy for flairs. https://github.com/basedcount/flair/blob/main/README.md. Again, I have no experience standing up a Lemmy instance nor do I know how hard that would be to implement if that option was favored.
I've never seen it on the official web app. I suspect that, if they existed, I would've seen them used by now.
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.
Yes
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.
I'm up voting this twice.
[DOUBLE RAINBOW]
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.
:(
Fucking snake assholes, amirite? Kill em all.
PS: I see you Jake Sully.
I ran into someone who was adamant he wouldn't use anything that touched AI.
I showed him how the fediverse app he was using to tell me that he wouldnt use AI had AI involvement.
He's still using it.
If youre trying to call me out for calling them out, its not the same and this falls flat.
These are all saying things and the world can and should be better.
This guy said I wont use anything that AI had any involvement in.
It'd be like saying I wont use an iPhone because apple is evil while using an iPhone.
Not apple really needs to do better, im not happy with some things they do, while using an iPhone.
What would these tags indicate?
Edit: I see that answering questions is hard 🤷
"Are you now, or have you ever been..."
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