It’s everywhere. I was just trying to find some information on starting seeds for the garden this year and I was met with AI article after AI article just making shit up. One even had a “picture” of someone planting some seeds and their hand was merged into the ceramic flower pot.
The AI fire hose is destroying the internet.
I fear when they learn a different layout. Right now it seems they are usually obvious, but soon I wont be able to tell slop from intelligence.
One could argue that if the AI response is not distinguishable from a human one at all, then they are equivalent and it doesn’t matter.
That said, the current LLM designs have no ability to do that, and so far all efforts to improve them beyond where they are today has made them worse at it. So, I don’t think that any tweaking or fiddling with the model will ever be able to do anything toward what you’re describing, except possibly using a different, but equally cookie-cutter way of responding that may look different from the old output, but will be much like other new output. It will still be obvious and predictable in a short time after we learn its new obvious tells.
The reason they can’t make it better anymore is because they are trying to do so by giving it ever more information to consume in a misguided notion that once it has enough data, it will be overall smarter, but that is not true because it doesn’t have any way to distinguish good data from garbage, and they have read and consumed the whole Internet already.
Now, when they try to consume more new data, a ton of it was actually already generated by an LLM, maybe even the same one, so contains no new data, but still takes more CPU to read and process. That redundant data also reinforces what it thinks it knows, counting its own repetition of a piece of information as another corroboration that the data is accurate. It thinks conjecture might be a fact because it saw a lot of “people” say the same thing. It could have been one crackpot talking nonsense that was then repeated as gospel on Reddit by 400 LLM bots. 401 people said the same thing; it MUST be true!
I think the point is rather that it is distinguishable for someone knowledgeable on the subject, but not for someone is not. Thus making it harder to evolve from the latter to the former.
You will be able to tell slop from intelligence.
However, you won’t be able to tell AI slop from human slop, and we’ve had human slop around and already overwhelming, but nothing compared to LLM slop volume.
In fact, reading AI slop text reminds me a lot of human slop I’ve seen, whether it’s ‘high school’ style paper writing or clickbait word padding of an article.
Before hitting submit I’d worry I’ve made a silly mistake which would make me look a fool and waste their time.
Do they think the AI written code Just Works ™? Do they feel so detached from that code that they don’t feel embarrassment when it’s shit? It’s like calling yourself a fictional story writer and writing “written by (your name)” on the cover when you didn’t write it, and it’s nonsense.
I’d worry I’ve made a silly mistake which would make me look a fool and waste their time.
AI bros have zero self awareness and shame, which is why I continue to encourage that the best tool for fighting against it is making it socially shameful.
Somebody comes along saying “Oh look at the image is just genera…” and you cut them with “looks like absolute garbage right? Yeah, I know, AI always sucks, imagine seriously enjoying that hahah, so anyway, what were you saying?”
LLM code generation is the ultimate dunning Kruger enhancer. They think they’re 10x ninja wizards because they can generate unmaintainable demos.
They’re not going to maintain it - they’ll just throw it back to the LLM and say “enhance”.
Sigh, now in CSI when they enhance a grainy image they AI will make a fake face and send them searching for someone that doesn’t exist, or it’ll use a face of someone in the training set and they go after the wrong person.
Either way I have a feeling they’ll he some ENHANCE failure episode due to AI.
From what I have seen Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. seem to be running bots that are going around and submitting updates to open source repos with little to no human input.
You guys, it’s almost as if AI companies try to kill FOSS projects intentionally by burying them in garbage code. Sounds like they took something from Steve Bannon’s playbook by flooding the zone with slop.
at least with foss the horseshit is being done in public.
Doesn’t someone have to review those submissions before they’re published?
Can Cloudflare help prevent this?
Do they think the AI written code Just Works
yes.
literally yes.
It’s insane
That’s how you know who never even tried to run the code.
that’s the annoying part.
LLM code can range to “doesn’t even compile” to “it actually works as requested”.
The problem is, depending on what exactly was done, the model will move mountains to actually get it running as requested. And will absolutely trash anything in its way, From “let’s abstract this with 5 new layers” to “I’m going to refactor that whole class of objects to get this simple method in there”.
The requested feature might actually work. 100%.
It’s just very possible that it either broke other stuff, or made the codebase less maintainable.
That’s why it’s important that people actually know the codebase and know what they/the model are doing. Just going “works for me, glhf” is not a good way to keep a maintainable codebase
LOL. So true.
On top of that, an LLM can also take you on a wild goose chase. When it gives you trash, you tell it to find a way to fix it. It introduces new layers of complication and installs new libraries without ever really approaching a solution. It’s up to the programmer to notice a wild goose chase like that and pull the plug early on.That’s a fun little mini-game that comes with vibe coding.
Reminds me of one job I had where my boss asked shortly after starting there if their entry test was too hard. They had gotten several submissions from candidates that wouldn’t even run.
I envision these types of people are now vibe coding.
Super lazy job applications… can’t even bother to put two minutes into vibing.
Nowadays people use OpenClaw agents which don’t really involve human input beyond the initial “fix this bug” prompt. They independently write the code, submit the PR, argue in the comments, and might even write a hit piece on you for refusing to merge their code.
I would think that they will have to combat AI code with an AI code recognizer tool that auto-flags a PR or issue as AI, then they can simply run through and auto-close them. If the contributor doesn’t come back and explain the code and show test results to show it working, then it is auto-closed after a week or so if nobody responds.
This was honestly my biggest fear for a lot of FOSS applications.
Not necessarily in a malicious way (although there’s certainly that happening as well). I think there’s a lot of users who want to contribute, but don’t know how to code, and suddenly think…hey…this is great! I can help out now!
Well meaning slop is still slop.
Damn, Godot too? I know Curl had to discontinue their bug bounties over the absolutely tidal volume of AI slop reports… Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.
Unfortunately it’s a general theme in Open Source. I lost almost all motivation for programming in my free-time because of all these AI-slop(-PRs). It’s kinda sad, how that Art (among others) is flooded with slop…
Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.
This is the perpetual issue, not just with AI: Any system will have flaws and weaknesses, but often, they can generally be papered over with some good will and patience…
Until selfish, immoral assholes come and ruin it for everyone.
From teenagers using the playground to smoke and bury their cigs in the sand, so now parents with small children can’t use it any more, over companies exploiting legal loopholes to AI slop drowning volunteers in obnoxious bullshit: Most individual people might be decent, but a single turd is all it takes to ruin the punch bowl.
Then get ready for people just making slop libraries, not because people are dissatisfied with existing solutions (such as I did with iota, which is a direct media layer similar to SDL, but has better access to some low-level functionality + OOP-ish + memory safe lang), but just because they can.
I got a link to a popular rectpacking algorithm pretty quickly after asking in a Discord server. Nowadays I’d be asked to “vibecode it”.
Can confirm the last part. I am in Uni and if anyone ever asks questions on the class groupchats then first 5-6 answers will be “ask chatgpt.”
Look. I have no problems if you want to use AI to make shit code for your own bullshit. Have at it.
Don’t submit that shit to open Source projects.
You want to use it? Use it for your own shit. The rest of us didn’t ask for this. I’m really hoping the AI bubble bursts in a big way very soon. Microsoft is going to need a bail out, openai is fucking doomed, and z/Twitter/grok could go either way honestly.
Who in their right fucking mind looks at the costs of running an AI datacenter, and the fact that it’s more economically feasible to buy a fucking nuclear power plant to run it all, and then say, yea, this is reasonable.
The C-whatever-O’s are all taking crazy pills.
This is big tech trying to kill FOSS.
Which is funny because most of them rely on it
I think moving off of GitHub to their own forge would be a good first step to reduce this spam.
To Codeberg we go!
Codeberg is cool but I would prefer not having all FOSS project centralised on another platform. In my opinion projects of the size of Godot should consider using their own infrastructure.
Let’s be realistic. Not everyone is going to move to Codeberg. Godot moving to Codeberg would be decentralizing.
Hosting a public code repo can be expensive, however they can run a private repo using Forgejo and mirror to Codeberg to create redundancy and have public code that doesn’t eat so much monthy revenue, if they even have revenue.
Back to sourceforge it is then.
“Real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.” - Linus Torvalds.
Don’t underestimate legitimate contributions from people who only do it because they already have an account.
It’s discussed in the Bluesky thread but the CI costs are too high on Gitlab and Codeberg for Godot‘s workflow.
That’s a shame. Did they take the wasted developer time dealing with slop into account in that discussion?
Why people try to contribute even if they don’t work on their codes? Ai slop not helping at all.
CV padding and main character syndrome.
Get that code off of slophub and move it to Codeberg.
Is codeberg magically immune to AI slop pull requests?
No but they are actively not promoting it or encouraging it. Github and MS are. If you’re going to keep staying on the pro-AI site, you’re going to eat the consequences of that. Github are actively encouraging these submissions with profile badges and other obnoxious crap. Its not an appropriate env for development anymore. Its gamified AI crap.
No (just like Lemmy isn’t immune against AI comments) but Github is actively working towards AI slop
If you want to get a programming job, you want a good looking CV. By contributing to prominent open source projects on github, github’s popularity and fancy profile system makes it look real good on a CV.
Github is a magnet for lazy vibe coders spamming their shit everywhere to farm their CVs. On other git hosts without such a fancy profile systems, there’s less on an incentive to do so. Slop to good code ratio should be lower and more managable.
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ot, but any other libre 1s u rec.?
Did you intend to encrypt your comment or was it an accident?
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Godot is also weighing the possibility of moving the project to another platform where there might be less incentive for users to “farm” legitimacy as a software developer with AI-generated code contributions.
Aahhh, I see the issue know.
That’s the incentive to just skirt the rules of whatever their submission policy is.
Get off of Github and I bet you those drop to nearly zero. Using Github is a choice with all of the AI slop it enables. They aren’t getting rid of it any time soon. The want agents and people making shitty code PRs—that’s money sent Microsoft’s way in their minds.
Now that they see what the cost of using Github is maybe Godot will (re?)consider codeberg or a self-hosted forgejo instance that they control.
A lot of programmers with thigh-high striped socks should take one for the team and take back Godot and such. Seriously!
I am a game developer and a web developer and I use AI sometimes just to make it write template code for me so that I can make the boilerplate faster. For the rest of the code, AI is soooo dumb it’s basically impossible to make something that works!
The context windows are only so large. Once you give it too much to juggle, it starts doing crazy shit.
Boilerplates are fine, they can even usually stub out endpoints.
Also the cheap model access is often a lot less useful than the enterprise stuff. I have access to three different services through work and even inside GPT land there are vast differences in capability.
Claude Code has this REALLY useful implementation of agents. You can create agents with their own system prompts. Then the main context window becomes an orchestrator; you tell it what you’re looking for and tell it to use the agents to do the work. The main window becomes a project manager with a mostly empty context window, it farms out the requests to the agents which each have their own context window. Each new task is individual, The orchestrator makes sure the agents get the job done, none of the workloads get so large that stuff goes insane.
It’s still not like you can say, go make me this game then argue with it for a couple of hours and end up with good things. But if you keep the windows small, it can crap-out a decent function/module if you clarify you want to focus on security, best practice, and code reusability. They’re also not bad at writing unit tests.
Something like speckit is necessary to make big, sweeping changes that continue past the context window
Interesting project, thanks for sharing
Yes I feel like many people misunderstand AI capabilities
They think it somehow comes up with the best solution, when really it’s more like lightning and takes the path of least resistance. It finds whatever works the fastest, if it even can without making it up and then lying that it works
It by no means creates elegant and efficient solutions to anything
AI is just a tool. You still need to know what you are doing to be able to tell if it’s solution is worth anything and then you still will need to be able to adjust and tweak it
It’s most useful for being able to maybe give you an idea on how to do something by coming up with a method/solution you may not have known about or wouldn’t have considered. Testing your own stuff as well is useful or having it make slight adjustments.
It finds whatever works the fastest
For a very lax definition of “works”…
Kind of agree with the rest of your points. Remember though, that the suggestions it gives you, for things you’re not familiar with may very well be terrible ones that are frowned upon. So it’s always best to triple check what it outputs, and only use it for broad suggestions.
Works in this case doesn’t mean the output works but that it passes the input parameter rules.
Couldn’t you just set up actual AI/LLM verification questions, like “how many r’s in strawberry?”
Or even just have an AI / Manual contribution divide. Wouldn’t stop everything 100% but might help the clean-up process better
Those kind of challenges only work for a short while. Chatgpt has solved the strawberry one already.
That said, I wish these AI people would just create their own projects and contribute to them. Create a LLM fork of the engine, and go nuts. If your AI is actually good, you’ll end up with a better engine and become the dominant fork.
They don’t want to do it in a corner where nobody can see, they want to push it on existing projects and attempt to justify it.
They also want the safety net of the maintainers. It’s cowardice really.
Use open source maintainers as free volunteers check whether your AI coding experiment works.
There’s a joke in science circles that goes something like this:
“Do you know how they call alternative medicine that works? Just regular medicine.”
Good code made by LLM should be indistinguishable from code made by an human… It would simply be “just code”.
It’s hard to create a project the size of Godot’s and not have a human in the loop somewhere filtering the slop and trying to create a cohesive code base. At that poin they either would be overwhelmed again or the code would be unmaintainable.
And then we would go full circle and get to the same point described by the article.
They can fork Godot and let their LLMs go at it. They don’t have to use the Godot human maintainers as free slop filters.
But of course, if they did that, their LLMs would have to stand on their own merits.
At the risk of drawing the ire of people…
… I have a local LLM that I run as a primarily a coding assistant, mostly for GDScript.
I’ve never like, submitted anything as a potential commit to Godot proper.
But dear lord, the amount of shennanigans I have had to figure out just to get an LLM to even understand GDScript’s syntax and methods properly is… substantial.
They tend to just default back to using things that work in Python or JS, but… do not work or exist in GDScript.
Like one recurring quirk is they will keep trying to use ? ternary instead of if x else(if) y constructions.
That or they will constantly fuck up trying to custom sorting properly, they’ll either do it syntactically wrong, or, just hallucinate various kinds of set/array methods and properties that don’t exist in GDScript.
And its a genuine stuggle to get them to comprehend more than roughly 750 lines of code at the same time, without confusing themselves.
It is possible to use an LLM to be like, hey, look at this code, help me refactor it to be more modular, or, standardize this kind of logic into a helper function… but you basically have to browbeat them with a custom prompt that tells them to stop doing all these dumb, basic things.
Even if you tell them in conversation " hey you did this wrong, heres how it actually works ", it doesnt matter, keep that conversation going and they will forget it and repeat the mistake… you have to have it contstantly present in the prompt.
The amount of babysitting and constantly telling an LLM the number of errors it is making is quite substantial.
It can be a thing that makes some sense to do in some situations, but it is extremely, extremely far away from ‘Make a game for me in Godot’, or even like ‘Make a third person camera script’.
You have to break things down into much, much more conceptually smaller chunks.
People who submit AI-generated code tend to crumble, or sound incomprehensible, in the face of the simplest questions. Thank goodness this works for code reviews… because if you look at AI CEO interviews, journalists can’t detect the BS.
LLMs are magic at everything that you don’t understand at all, and they’re horrifically incompetent at anything you do actually understand pretty well.
You could also ask users to type the words fuck or shit in the description somewhere. LLMs cannot do that AFAIK.
I mean, ChatGPT can do it. I just tested it. And if you run your own AI, you can probably remove most such rules anyway.
Yeah but that won’t stop people from manually submitting prs made with AI. A lot of the slop isn’t just automated pull requests but people using AI to find and fix “bugs”, without understanding the code at all.
How about asking it to write a short political speech on climate change. Then, just count the number of rhetoric devices and em-dashes. A human dev wouldn’t be bothered to write anything fancy or impactful when they just want to submit a bug fix. It would be simple, poorly written, and filled with typos. LLMs try to make it way too impressive and impactful.
Am I going to have to start adding typos to my text on purpose?
No need to add any more than you usually do. Just leave the ones you are unable to see. Besides, LLMs tend to write in overly grand style, whereas humans can’t be bothered to use every trick in the book. Humans just get to the point and skip all the high-impact language that LLMs seem to love.
I usually proofread any messages that aren’t for my close friends or family lol
The funnier thing is when you try to get an LLM to do like, a report on its creators.
You can keep feeding them articles detailing the BS their company is up to, and it will usually just keep reverting to the company line, despite a preponderance of evidence that said company line is horseshit.
Like uh, try to get an LLM to give you an exact number of uh, how much will this conversation we are having, how much will that increase RAM prices in a 3 month period?
What do you think about ~95% of companies implementing ‘AI’ into their business processes reporting a 0 to negative boost to productivity?
What are the net economic damages of this malinvestment?
Give it a bunch of economic data, reports, etc.
Results are usually what I would describe as ‘comical’.
“Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds You”. LLMs seem to have internalized this rule pretty well. I can imagine that this idea can also be taken much further. Basically like trying to search “Tiananmen Square massacre” on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China.
Well, what if LLMs were instructed to not talk about “sensitive topics” like that? After all, more and more people are already using an LLM as a search engine replacement, so it’s only natural that Microsoft and OpenAI might receive some interesting letters about implementing very specific limitations.
