A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
I’m not so sure anymore whether THEY are providing FOSS or just approving slop PRs. I do not like harassment at all, even less against a guy that says is/was dealing with depression. That’s why I comment here. Being said that, it’s kind of a jerk move to just hide the fact he is using this tool for development under his own name. As a teacher, few things would make me more mad than having a student doing this.
I mean does it really matter? people are using his software and it is totally irrelevant how he is developing it. It doesn’t matter if he is scribbling it on paper or using VS Code or something else or an AI tool. He can develop the software as he likes. You can walz into an open source project and demand that the project has to work according to your own standards. We are not in school - in school the cheating with AI is hindering your learning progress, but if you want to use a coding agent as adult, just do it. And you don’t have to disclose it because why should you? You also don’t disclose that you are using code auto-completion or some other technology.
That’s where we are different. I don’t use Lutris, now I’m sure I won’t be trying it. Of course there are people who think this is relevant. I didn’t think I’d have to explain to you that it is not about them using AI as a tool, it’s about not giving enough information about their authorship what concerns me. I suppose they accept donations, well, it is important to me that part of my donations don’t end up with companies that hurt the environment and people’s jobs. Did auto-completion technologies steal almost all humankind constructed knowledge? Do they need catastrophic amounts of environmental resources to work? Do they produce grave diseases to whole populations near them? Did they disrupt several markets for being created? How many employments did they ruin?
Does it really matter? You do not know how commercial software is being developed. In most cases you do not even know which language is used and AI usage is also not disclosed. You do not know this about your phone, you do not know about your appliances, you do not know how the software in your car is being made, you do not know how everything you’re using every day is being created. I’m not sure why you have other standards for open source software. And please do not tell me that you are only using open source software in your car or in the train you’re using as public transit.
And yes, there might be harm, but let’s be honest, every other company around there is doing harm to someone or the environment. And if an open source dev uses AI this is really not the fight you want to do. fight against oil companies or something like that. factory farming, the car industry, big tech and all the other industries doing real harm. Attacking the dev of Lutris is not the fight anyone should put some effort in.