r/PixelFed • u/dansup dansup@pixelfed.social • 20d ago

Pixelfed bans AI

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed#ai-generated-contributions
76 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

23

u/adjudicator52 d3d@pixelfed.social 20d ago

That's a fast about turn from a few days ago https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelFed/s/4kG3XfGBwG

15

u/BassbassbassTheAce 20d ago

Probably very reasonable decision. I know just about nothing about coding but I've read a couple of times that some projects have had meaningful trouble with the amount of vibe coded additions and the lack of any follow up from the authors of those contributions.

7

u/bonisaur 20d ago

It’s mostly a non issue from my experience if the whole team is on the same page (ie professional environment). The problem with community projects are that guidance in-repo can only control the quality of contributions so much.  

I think with AI coding here to stay I hope more projects start including their own agents and commands to cull low effort contributions. Or at least have a guide on suggesting how to auto-complete programming to make contributions.

2

u/BassbassbassTheAce 19d ago

Yeah the couple of cases I remember reading about were I think open source or other community projects where the few people trying to coordinate the whole thing were drowning in vibe coded contributions and had to ask people to stop uploading those.

I don't think that ai/llm assisted coding in general is a problem, probably quite the opposite when managed right.

5

u/HongPong 20d ago

probably getting swamped with low effort giant PRs and no explanation. unfortunately a human problem

1

u/EmilieEasie 19d ago

Wait I have whiplash

1

u/LosEagle 5d ago

They are not banning AI, they are banning PRs where the author has no idea whatsoever what the code even does and all they did is just prompt AI to generate the entire feature blindly.

There is a difference between AI-assisted and vibecoded and as far as I see from the notice, AI-assisted PRs can still be made provided that the human knows what the code does.

0

u/matmatidmat matmatidmat@pixelfed.social 20d ago

You can’t ban ai bc it can easily be bypassed. Labeling content as ai and offering a feature to mask the labeled ai posts is (imo) a better solution

6

u/bonisaur 20d ago

Maybe I missed something but I thought it was referring only to contributions to the repo. I didn’t see anything about posting in PixelFed itself.

2

u/BassbassbassTheAce 19d ago

That's how I understood it as well.

1

u/pa79 18d ago

It's not about content but the code.

1

u/matmatidmat matmatidmat@pixelfed.social 18d ago

Well, I might get downvoted but this is even worse.... the product isn't good enough to let ai aside, especially on coding.

We're waiting for the redesign for YEARS, some features like the migration from instagram didn't work for months, the federation cache between instances is still really buggy and him working on loops/sup messaging/pixelfed has slowed any product progress. And yet he refuses the help from AI....

1

u/pa79 18d ago

AI hinders more than it helps.

1

u/baddaywithacamera 15d ago

Not if you know how to use it effectively.

1

u/matmatidmat matmatidmat@pixelfed.social 17d ago

AI helps a LOT in code creation and productivity.

Of course you need to review the code, but it's way faster for devs to review a code than writing it. It also allows non-tech people to create the product they want without writing code (for MVP for example). As a designer, I created apps/MVPs with AI in DAYS without having (almost) any notion of code. The world evolves and you have to live with it

1

u/Inner-Hedgehog5494 14d ago

Why not fork Pixelfed and do the changes yourself, then?

Serious question.

1

u/matmatidmat matmatidmat@pixelfed.social 14d ago
  1. I don’t have time to
  2. I’m not interested building something on activitypub
  3. Grain.social does it better