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284 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21 Nov \ on: The problem with AI generated contributions to open source projects AI
SN has an AI disclosure statement but I'm not sure how much it helps. Those who use ai to produce slop probably won't admit it, and those that use AI in a more appropriate way just have to spend a few seconds writing a generic statement
I think the problem isn't AI per se. It may be that AI has made a group of people who previously wouldn't submit contributions because they didn't feel qualified, to all of a sudden start submitting despite still being unqualified. Maybe when more people learn that AI is not a magic bullet, and that it still requires some degree of human checking/input, that kind of behavior will stop?
Those who use ai to produce slop probably won't admit it
I considered this when I added the disclosure statement. For me, it’s about trust and being honest.
If someone lies about it and it’s obvious AI slop, this tells me I can’t trust them and need to verify everything they did and say. But instead, their PRs will probably just no longer get reviewed.
Also, it does help because now I need to spend less time guessing if something is AI. I spent too much time on that.
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An AI prohiition feels like a proof of work gate to me. Sure, people can go around it and use AI anyway, but then it puts them in the position of being willing to be dishonest from the start.
I was once playing mini golf. The course was not terribly great. it was often easy to hit your ball off the fairway you were supposed to be playing and "skip" over to the green or even to get a hole in one. Whereas if you stuck with the fairway you had to go through an obstacle of some difficulty.
One of the people I was playing with kept short-circuiting the holes and getting very low scores by jumping the links. He made light fun of me for being a "rule follower" because I wouldn't do the same.
I tried to explain that it had to do with the point of the game -- I was not playing mini golf to achieve a world-record score or even to beat him at easy shots. I was playing because it's fun to navigate the obstacles. He did not understand.
This is relevant here because the point of an AI prohibition is not AI is bad or that it isn't capable of helping a writer produce good work, but rather that by requiring someone to write a BIP without it, you are asking them to put a certain amount of skin in the game via their time and effort. And this might be a valuable thing.
And it is especially valuable if the person demonstrates that they are unwilling to do so. Because then the reviewers can meet this with an equal unwillinginess to put time and effort into review.
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Maybe when more people learn that AI is not a magic bullet, and that it still requires some degree of human checking/input, that kind of behavior will stop?
This is what I hoped for but it's only getting more frequent - at least for me. It's the marketing from the LLM service providers. They keep pitching their products in a harmful way ("Our AI product solves everything, and does it better than humans") because they need moneys to burn. It's a swindle but it won't stop if even Nvidia does +5% after a single simple statement of opinion from the CEO about AI.
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group of people who previously wouldn't submit contributions because they didn't feel qualified
I think I would describe the group differently: there is a group of people who just learned about bitcoin and want to fix it. They have not taken the time to delve into it's history very much, certainly not the history of its development (mailing list archives, github comments, etc...). They may not even be aware of the proper form a BIP should take, but they have learned that there is such a thing as a BIP and with Chat at their side they are able to produce something that superficially resembles a BIP draft submitted by an experienced Bitcoin developer who has done all the things mentioned above.
I do not believe these people care very much whether AI is a magic bullet or not, nor do they have the humility to realize that their great idea for a BIP should probably stew for a few years before they even consider submitting it.
I'm sure there are many others who are relatively new to Bitcoin or who have not been involved in Bitcoin development, yet who have excellent ideas -- but I also think that writing the BIP yourself is a manageable hurdle for such individuals.
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there is a group of people who just learned about bitcoin and want to fix it. They have not taken the time to delve into it's history very much, certainly not the history of its development
That group is continuously there and has been from the beginning in Bitcoin (and is also not unique in Bitcoin.)
jgarzik has made no secret of him starting like that.I think that the most harmful symptom in the above is "want to fix". As a conservative developer that doesn't want to fix what isn't broken, especially not something as fragile as protocol or consensus, resisting this is probably the most exhausting part of the job in the long term. And most people that have a yolo mindset keep it. One way or another, you'll always find them trying to change things, cradle to grave. I often feel that change is a greater good than stability to this group of developers.
However, these aren't the same group of people as vibe coders per se. There's some overlap and cross-pollination but I think that those are distinct groups. I've dealt with people like this in FOSS since the 90s
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