alt Hacker NewsWe sorely need a way to reliably detect AI slop, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible and it's just getting harder and harder.
Last month I tried my hand at finding a way to tell whether an OSS project is slop or not, based on the amount of "human attention" it received vs the amount of code it contains. The idea is that a 100k LOC project which received 3 days' worth of attention from a human is most certainly slop.
The approach doesn't work very well, though¹, mostly because it's hard to gauge the amount of attention that was given. If I see one commit with +3000 LOC, I can assume it's AI-generated, but maybe you're just the type of dev that commits infrequently.
Maybe we need some sort of "proof of human attention" for digital artifacts, that guarantees that a human spent X time working on it.
¹ I wrote about it here https://pscanf.com/s/352/
Replies
There's no reason to care that a human spent time on it.
Humans are bad at writing code. Garbage PRs and slop have been a problem in open source and bug bounty programs since long before AI came on the scene.
We need better AI so that there's no need to solicit external bug fixes, and better AI so other contributions can be evaluated for usefulness and quality.
What do you care if a human ever looked at it at all? It implies that humans are adding value to the process. It's possible for a human to add value. The right human can add tremendous value. But I'll take a completely autonomous AI over 99% of the human software engineers and 99% of the people contributing PRs and bugfixes.
It was hard to keep up with slop before. It's a lot harder now. AI will help weed through the garbage.
I suspect that it will be impossible, soon. People will just train LLMs to "act human," and pass the various turing tests we throw at them.
I stay pretty busy[0], and have been accused of "gaming" my GH repos.
That's not the case. I'm retired, experienced, and working on software all day, every day. I just don't get paid for it.
I also don't especially care, whether or not anyone thinks I'm a bot. I eat my own dogfood. Most of my work is on modules that I use in my own projects.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff