5 ms·

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evid

by khalic 8mo ago

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

buzzardbait 8mo ago
Probably just an attempt to stop low effort LLM copy pasta.
- Ekaros 8mo ago
  A sign to point at when you get someone is posting "I asked AI to fix this and got this". You can stop reading and any arguments right there. Saving lot of time and effort.
ptnpzwqd 8mo ago
I suspect this is for now just a rough filter to remove the lowest effort PRs. It likely will not be enough for long, though, so I suspect we will see default deny policies soon enough, and various different approaches to screening potential contributors.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bonesss 8mo ago
Any sufficiently advanced LLM-slop will be indistinguishable from regular human-slop. But that’s what they are after. This heuristic lets the project flag problematic slop with minimal investment avoiding the cost issues with reviewing low-quality low-effort high-volume contributions, which should be near ideal. Much like banning pornography on an artistic photo site, the perfect application on the borderline of the rule is far less important than filtering power “I know it when I see it” provides to the standard case. Plus, smut peddlers aren’t likely to set an OpenClaw bot-agent swarm loose arguing the point with you for days then posting blogs and medium articles attacking you personally for “discrimination”.
BlackFly 8mo ago
It is enforceable, I think you mean to say that it cannot be prevented since people can attempt to hide their usage? Most rules and laws are like that, you proscribe some behavior but that doesn't prevent people from doing it. Therefore you typically need to also define punishments: > This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project.
- hparadiz 8mo ago
  What happens when the PR is clear, reasonable, short, checked by a human, and clearly fixes, implements, or otherwise improves the code base and has no alternative implementation that is reasonably different from the initially presented version?
  - pm215 8mo ago
    If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "sorry, no, we told you the rules and so you've wasted effort -- we will not take this even if it is good and perhaps the only sensible implementation". Perhaps somebody else will eventually re-implement it later without looking at the AI PR.
    - hparadiz 8mo ago
      How funny would it be if the path to actually implement that thing is then cut off because of a PR that was submitted with the exact same patch. I'm honestly sitting here grinning at the absurdity demonstrated here. Some things can only be done a certain way. Especially when you're working with 3rd party libraries and APIs. The name of the function is the name of the function. There's no walking around it.
      - pm215 8mo ago
        That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable by merging this AI-generated PR. It's similar to how I can't implement a feature by copying-and-pasting the obvious code from some commercially licensed project. But somebody else could write basically the same thing independently without knowing about the proprietary-license code, and that would be fine.
_zagj 8mo ago
> The LLM ban is unenforceable Just require that the CLA/Certificate of Origin statement be printed out, signed, and mailed with an envelope and stamp, where besides attesting that they appropriately license their contributions ((A)GPL, BSD, MIT, or whatever) and have the authority to do so, that they also attest that they haven't used any LLMs for their contributions. This will strongly deter direct LLM usage. Indirect usage, where people whip up LLM-generated PoCs that they then rewrite, will still probably go on, and go on without detection, but that's less objectionable morally (and legally) than trying to directly commit LLM code. As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers, as well as respect for the license choices of other developers/projects. I can't tell if LLMs caused this, but there's a noticeable difference from the way things were 10 years ago.
- tentacleuno 8mo ago
  > As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers What do you mean by this? I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses. I typically had a "fuck it" attitude when it came to the license, and I assume quite a lot of other people shared that sentiment. The code is the fun bit.
  - _zagj 8mo ago
    > I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses No, it wasn't that way in the 2000s, e.g., on platforms like SourceForge, where OSS devs would go out of their way to learn the terms and conditions of the popular licenses and made sure to respect each other's license choices, and usually defaulted to GPL (or LGPL), unless there was a compelling reason not to: https://web.archive.org/web/20160326002305/https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/11/14/open-source-licenses/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160326002305/https://redmonk.c... Now the corporate-backed "MIT-EVERYTHING" mindvirus has ruined all of that: https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025 https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025
    - 8mo ago
scuff3d 8mo ago
Speed limits are unenforceable. You'll never catch everyone speeding so why even bother trying.

by khalic 8mo ago

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

buzzardbait 8mo ago

Probably just an attempt to stop low effort LLM copy pasta.

Ekaros 8mo ago
A sign to point at when you get someone is posting "I asked AI to fix this and got this". You can stop reading and any arguments right there. Saving lot of time and effort.

ptnpzwqd 8mo ago

I suspect this is for now just a rough filter to remove the lowest effort PRs. It likely will not be enough for long, though, so I suspect we will see default deny policies soon enough, and various different approaches to screening potential contributors.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

bonesss 8mo ago

Any sufficiently advanced LLM-slop will be indistinguishable from regular human-slop. But that’s what they are after. This heuristic lets the project flag problematic slop with minimal investment avoiding the cost issues with reviewing low-quality low-effort high-volume contributions, which should be near ideal. Much like banning pornography on an artistic photo site, the perfect application on the borderline of the rule is far less important than filtering power “I know it when I see it” provides to the standard case. Plus, smut peddlers aren’t likely to set an OpenClaw bot-agent swarm loose arguing the point with you for days then posting blogs and medium articles attacking you personally for “discrimination”.

BlackFly 8mo ago

It is enforceable, I think you mean to say that it cannot be prevented since people can attempt to hide their usage? Most rules and laws are like that, you proscribe some behavior but that doesn't prevent people from doing it. Therefore you typically need to also define punishments: > This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project.

hparadiz 8mo ago
What happens when the PR is clear, reasonable, short, checked by a human, and clearly fixes, implements, or otherwise improves the code base and has no alternative implementation that is reasonably different from the initially presented version?
- pm215 8mo ago
  If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "sorry, no, we told you the rules and so you've wasted effort -- we will not take this even if it is good and perhaps the only sensible implementation". Perhaps somebody else will eventually re-implement it later without looking at the AI PR.
  - hparadiz 8mo ago
    How funny would it be if the path to actually implement that thing is then cut off because of a PR that was submitted with the exact same patch. I'm honestly sitting here grinning at the absurdity demonstrated here. Some things can only be done a certain way. Especially when you're working with 3rd party libraries and APIs. The name of the function is the name of the function. There's no walking around it.
    - pm215 8mo ago
      That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable by merging this AI-generated PR. It's similar to how I can't implement a feature by copying-and-pasting the obvious code from some commercially licensed project. But somebody else could write basically the same thing independently without knowing about the proprietary-license code, and that would be fine.

_zagj 8mo ago

> The LLM ban is unenforceable Just require that the CLA/Certificate of Origin statement be printed out, signed, and mailed with an envelope and stamp, where besides attesting that they appropriately license their contributions ((A)GPL, BSD, MIT, or whatever) and have the authority to do so, that they also attest that they haven't used any LLMs for their contributions. This will strongly deter direct LLM usage. Indirect usage, where people whip up LLM-generated PoCs that they then rewrite, will still probably go on, and go on without detection, but that's less objectionable morally (and legally) than trying to directly commit LLM code. As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers, as well as respect for the license choices of other developers/projects. I can't tell if LLMs caused this, but there's a noticeable difference from the way things were 10 years ago.

tentacleuno 8mo ago
> As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers What do you mean by this? I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses. I typically had a "fuck it" attitude when it came to the license, and I assume quite a lot of other people shared that sentiment. The code is the fun bit.
- _zagj 8mo ago
  > I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses No, it wasn't that way in the 2000s, e.g., on platforms like SourceForge, where OSS devs would go out of their way to learn the terms and conditions of the popular licenses and made sure to respect each other's license choices, and usually defaulted to GPL (or LGPL), unless there was a compelling reason not to: https://web.archive.org/web/20160326002305/https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/11/14/open-source-licenses/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160326002305/https://redmonk.c... Now the corporate-backed "MIT-EVERYTHING" mindvirus has ruined all of that: https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025 https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025
  - 8mo ago

scuff3d 8mo ago

Speed limits are unenforceable. You'll never catch everyone speeding so why even bother trying.