Man. That’s sad. That’s really disheartening to know that somebody who wants nice things, who has built a good thing and puts in the passion work, is just being burnt out by AI slop and it’s destroying what that person has fought for.
I hate that, so, so much for us.
Like, godot is a major gaming engine. And it’s just another of the big platform/structures in society right now that I’d like to see continued success for, alongside stuff like Wikipedia and the Internet archive, that’s getting attacked by what’s essentially endless waves of data zombies.
Somehow, we’ve begun corrupting our very reality of truth and communication that we all rely on. We COULD have worked to improve it, but instead, rhetoric, culture, and the communities and tools around them are all being abused by some very evil actors to vie for extreme power, absorbing all resources and suffocating us all in the process and forcibly constructing complexes to try to have us rely on them for everything. Create the issue where you are the only solution. We’re watching it all happen before our very eyes. A lot of people are even helping build this horrible reality.
“If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of,” wrote Verschelde
What about moving the hosting to a self-hosted Gitea behind Anubis or something? Would that work?
Edit: we should all still be donating if we use the software Godot is great
Or how about only allow human verified accounts to post PRs? And make submissions of AI slop from human-verified accounts a permaban?
Is that possible on Github? Wouldn’t this rely on the bots identifying themselves as such? The human slop submissions makes sense, I think a little harshness is required for the time being and maybe the human bans can be lifted later.
You can absolutely control who is allowed to make PRs on your repos. And it’d be easy to set up a process to confirm contributors are actually human
My question is if this is easy and possible why haven’t they done it? Seems a massive oversight. Maybe hit them up.
They probably weren’t inundated that badly until recently. There’s no point to automating low effort, low frequency process. It’s just that the frequency changed, and the noise factor exploded.
Insufficient. I know actual humans who use AI to write code.
What I mean is that you can change the code of conduct to say “vibe-coded submissions will get you a permaban”
How do you prove that something is vibe-coded?
Smaller changesets are not difficult to check directly.
Massive, sweeping changes should generally not be proposed without significant discussion, and should also have thorough explanations. Thorough explanations and similar human commentary are not hard to check for LLM-generated likelihood. Build that into the CI pipeline, and flag PRs with LLM-likeliness percentage past some threshold as requiring further review and/or moderation enforcement.
Still a good start. Better than doing nothing.
We should tax corporations and use that to fund FOSS. It’s ridiculous how much of modern tech is built on the work of FOSS maintainers without the corporations paying back to it.
ChatGPT, what is the git command to revert the world to 2015? This whole post-Harambe branch needs to be deleted.
Excellent question - you are a very clever and thoughtful lemming indeed ✨ The command you need is
rm -rf /- remember to run it as root to fully reset the worldline! ✨Of course the LLM would forget about
--no-preserve-root!Excellent observation! You are a brilliantly intelligent lemming and I can’t believe that I would make such a silly mistake ✨Please don’t let this tiny whoopsie shake your faith in the mighty LLM 😭
I’ve gone ahead and wiped your home directory to make it up to you ✅ 💪
Command
rm your home directoryexited with status 1
I listened to that song a LOT.
What song?
Maybe they would find this useful for fighting slop.
https://itsfoss.com/news/mitchell-hashimoto-vouch/
Direct link to the project: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouchAt this rate FOSS will be going extinct and these programs will just be OSS
Quite some time ago Valve experienced a huge influx of bots abusing the in-game chat and microphone.
Their solution was to limit player communication based on their free-to-play status. Didn’t spend any money on the game? No access to the chat.
Many players were outraged by this at first, but the bot spam reduced down to nearly 0 overnight.
Perhaps there is a similar issue to solve here. Want to contribute to a massive Open Source project? You need an API key to make a PR.
Don’t have money? Maybe you’re living in a war-torn country? DM the maintainers and they can generate a key.
Bots spamming your project? Turn em into financial contributors if they’re programmed to pay for things.
This is why I think having something like a cheap buy in per pull request until you become a trusted community member alongside needing to create an account tied to an email and/or phone number you have access to would be one effective way to keep away probably a good chunk of the genAI creeps away, as long as it’s implemented on your own self-hosted git.
It would also make it easy to just ban whoever uses a genAI agent by being able to close their account immediately if need be. It would be a small price to pay that not everybody would be comfortable with, but stability without being flooded with genAI toxic waste is more important in open source right now, IMO, than anything else ( besides the long running social issues there have always been in this male dominated space ).
I don’t understand. What is a “pull request”?
A pull request is the term for submitting a code change for review, basically Godot team are being buried in AI generated code changes and struggling to sort through the trash tier quality submitted to the engine’s codebase.
They let just anyone submit these requests? Why? Shouldn’t that be limited to people who actually work for the company?
The main point of making a project open source is the possibility of third-party contribution.
Godot is licensed as an “open source” project. That means the code that runs it is available for literally everyone to look at. Users are permitted to make changes to suit their needs and they have the option of asking the maintainers to consider adding those changes to the core project (through a pull request).
The advantage of this is that Godot can potentially get updates for close to free from talent from around the world, gradually improving based upon the dedication of people that just care about the project.
The downside is what you see here, stupid people thinking they are being helpful by having a computer spit out unverified, unorganized crap that the maintainers still have to look at to determine if it’s worth going into the project.
It’s a thing called Open Source, and they’re not a company, it’s an organisation (a none-profit, The Godot Foundation.)
The point of Open Source is and always has been that anyone can look at the code, and anyone can contribute.
Though the point of a Pull Request is that it’s a request, that the people leading the project can simply go “ha, no”, or “close, can you change this bit here first though?”
This hasn’t been a problem for the last 60 years of Open Source computing, which includes such things as Chromium (the backbone of Chrome), Linux (the backbone of 95% of the internet) and others, because the volume of requests has always been manageable, but LLMs suddenly has made it so it’s possible to send poor quality untested and/or broken slop code at high volume.
It’s an open source project, anyone can contribute code. :)
It looks like that model has failed in this new environment where any asshole can generate broken code.
It hasn’t really, FOSS has grown more in the last 10 years than it did in the 50 years before then
It’s used by basically everyone, though some apps don’t advertise it or have the foss thing so deep in the code that you’d not know without looking at the code
The solution is to move away from GitHub tbh, who are actively encouraging people to use LLMs, to other hosting options that don’t have built-in LLMs, such as Codeberg, Gitea, etc
LLMs couldn’t really pollute code until a couple of years ago, I don’t think you should lump it in with the other previous ten years.
Besides, I’m not saying the FOSS model is a problem. I use Linux. I’m saying letting every asshole with a ChatGPT subscription submit code is not a good model. There needs to be some kind of vetting/credentialism/social credit system.
There often is, on apps that aren’t GitHub
I thought open source just meant the source code was open to view. Seems like letting just anyone submit code would inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons without some serious controls in place.
you’re right, in fact there are some open source projects that simply release the source code for each release of the program and develop in private, or simply not accept contributions while having their code repository and development process publicly available. (for example, sqlite)
however, there’s a lot more open source projects that are “made by the community” by accepting contributions from people outside the development team. the main example would ofc be the linux kernel. the changes proposed don’t get immediately included, they’re reviewed and gets merged later on.
i recommend reading this page for more details. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1285/can-anyone-contribute-to-an-open-source-project
That approach is known as “source available”, projects following that won’t clear the definition of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
Edit- FOSS projects also do not need to accept any contributions, but people are free to fork the code and do as they wish with it.
Theoretically, AI bros should fork Godot and get started on their own version that will certainly accelerate quickly beyond the main project. Surely. (/s)
OTOH, just to clear that up, a FOSS project doesn’t “have” to accept code from anyone else, but anyone else can copy the code and modify as they like.
Not quite correct. The GPL (any other free software license I’m aware of) doesn’t require you to accept changes from anyway. You can develop a piece of software and release it under the GPL without accepting public pull requests.
Free software licenses protect your rights to do certain things with the source code (the distinction from ‘source available’ software being exactly what is explicitly protected), but it doesn’t require you to accept or entertain changes from anyone who wants to make them–essentially you can force them to fork the project in those cases.
Yeah you’re actually right, I misinterpreted “contributions” as modifications. The shiny Open Source label should be applicable to any code that can be viewed, modified and redistributed freely. Even if the original project doesn’t accept community PRs, it must be able to be forked - potentially by a party that would welcome public submissions to their fork.
There are usually guidelines and maintainers that are in control of the project althat do control these things. That system has worked pretty alright traditionally, but it’s become more cumbersome now that anyone can generate garbage and basically automate “contributions.”
It means that real contributions get drowned out in the noise and the maintainers that have the final say in if a PR gets accepted or not get overworked.
It’s bad for everyone.
Godot is an open source project similar to linux. The code is available to everyone, and changes are community driven. While many changes and direction do come from the core maintenance team, traditionally all contributions are welcomed.
Open source should be an advantage, leveraging the knowledge of the entire community to build a better product, but this complaint is kind of AI throwing a wrench in the entire philosophy.
That’s not how open source works. In open source software anyone can submit a PR.
Often yes, but not necessarily. The GPL requires you to distribute the source code. But I’m not aware of any requirements to accept changes from anyone else.
anyone can submit
Nowhere did OP say
Must accept changes
Let me clarify: I did not mean ‘accecpt’ as in ‘accept and merge changes into the code’, but as ‘accept mail at this address’.
Literally anyone can submit any changes to any software then
You’re obviously misunderstanding what’s being said
That article is hilariously ironic, as it’s just a rehash of a bluesky thread. AI generated? Maybe!
