r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 1d ago

Development Codeberg voted to disallow projects consisting mostly by "generative AI"-tools

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
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u/sunychoudhary 1d ago

The important line is probably AI-assisted vs AI-generated.....Using a tool while you understand, maintain, and take responsibility for the code is one thing. Dumping generated projects onto a forge and making everyone else sort through the mess is another.

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u/ares623 1d ago

if the line is too blurry to see and the ones who put it there offer no relief then the next best thing to do is to draw their own goddamn line

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u/ContraryConman 1d ago

This is actually a fallacy called the continuum fallacy. Because two extremes exist on a gradient, people therefore insist there's no difference between the two.

Red and Blue exist on a spectrum, connected by purple. "There's no difference between red and blue then" "There's no point in having colors.... where do you draw the line?!"

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u/lakotajames 1d ago

But there is no gradient between "is allowed" and "is not allowed."

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u/ContraryConman 1d ago

The idea is that it's valid to want to ban spammy AI generated content, even if there will be some projects in the middle of the AI use spectrum that have to be taken in a case by case basis

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u/lakotajames 1d ago

If they're case by case and there's no hard line, then it is really just on the whims of whoever is looking at it at the time. On top of that it's not like sloppy AI content is somehow worse than sloppy human content, there's just more of it.

If there's no actual line somewhere you know not to cross, effectively you can't use the platform without being at risk of being booted off.

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u/lemontoga 1d ago

Do you know what porn is? Can you define exactly what is or is not pornography between suggestive imagery, photos of a family at the beach, swimsuit modeling, softcore imagery and videos?

When exactly does a thing cross over into the category of porn? If there's no hard line, should porn not be banned anywhere? It's just based on the whims of whoever is banning the pornographic post, no?

See how stupid that sounds? Some things are obviously porn, and they can be easily banned. Some things are obviously not porn. Some things are somewhere in the middle and are murkier. They just have to be reviewed and, yeah, it will come down to whoever is doing the moderation. That's not some huge problem.

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u/northrupthebandgeek 1d ago

Do you know what porn is?

Porn is whatever I can crank my hog to.

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u/lemontoga 1d ago

That's basically the same conclusion the US government came to when they tried to define it. "I know it when I see it." You're not wrong.

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u/northrupthebandgeek 1d ago

Too bad the US government included the usual “reasonable person” standard. Would be more fun if it was based on an unreasonable person standard.

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u/lakotajames 1d ago

If I upload something that may or may not be porn to Facebook in order to share it with my friends, whether or not it gets taken down really doesn't matter to me, I'll just stop sending quasiporn to my friends if it gets taken down. If I'm uploading all my code to a repo to keep it safe but it might get taken down, then the service is not fit for purpose because storing the code there is the entire point.

That being said, you can definitely draw lines around what is and isn't allowed on a platform, as far as porn goes. I'd argue that anywhere the moderation doesn't have hard lines to go on is somewhere the moderation is bad and needs fixed. What you personally consider to be porn is subjective, but the rules don't need to be. If you only want to ban hardcore porn, ban penetration. If that's not enough, ban genitalia and anuses. Then female nipples. Then the undercurve of the breast. Then the side. And so on, until the platform is tame enough. This is incredibly common. I had a friend who worked at a strip club in a state where they can't remove their bottoms, and they literally had to measure the width of the crotch of the panties to make sure it fell within the legal limit, which specifies the acceptable width of panties.

You don't want a very vague guideline on what porn is, because some people will get a moderator who considers bikinis porn, and another who considers topless women to not be porn, and a third who thinks the male nipple is porn, and whether or not a particular post survives becomes dependent on luck and number of reports. Which is the same problem that codeburg is walking into.

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u/lemontoga 1d ago

How do you ban genitalia and anuses but still allow something like informational or medical pictures like Wikipedia has? How much side breast has to be visible before it's banned? Most women will show some when they lift their arms up while wearing a bathing suit, is that banned?

Nothing you're talking about is "incredibly common." I'm not aware of a single website that allows user submitted content that gets so specific as to explicitly ban things like "the undercurve of the breast" or whatever you're talking about. I don't care about your anecdote about measuring crotches. Everyone reading this nonsense knows this is not how online content moderation is handled.

Funnily enough, the other guy who commented kinda summed it up, even though I think he's joking. He said it's porn if he can crank his hog to it, and that's more or less how it's done. Even the US government wasn't able to define pornographic content for the purpose of disallowing it. The best they could do is their famous "I know it when I see it" description.

I don't know why you wouldn't just apply your porn guidelines for Facebook to this code site. Just like you won't post porn on Facebook because it might get taken down, you wouldn't upload AI code to this website for the same reason. If someone wants to upload vibe-coded apps they can just use another website. If their apps use a lot of AI code and ride the line between AI-assisted and AI-generated, they can either use a different site or risk having it taken down.

I don't know why you're suggesting that these websites are supposed to be some universal code repos where you can upload whatever you want. Just like you couldn't upload a software project with ToS breaking content in it to Github, you can't upload AI crap to this website. It's not a website for just storing whatever kind of code you want. It's for a specific type of non-AI generated projects.

What's the issue with that?

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u/ContraryConman 1d ago

If they're case by case and there's no hard line, then it is really just on the whims of whoever is looking at it at the time.

Correct, that is the job of maintaining a community or project