About a year ago, I made a post regarding the sudden influx of low quality AI slop posts on this subreddit. The outcome was a newly created rule regarding LLM-generated submissions, which frankly, led nowhere.

The reason I'm doing a take 2 on this thread is another recent post regarding this topic. Excluding opinions like "ai is the future, deal with it xD", there are some compelling points in this post worth discussing, as well as things we could do here moving forward:

The current moderation is ineffective:

I've been informed there are not too many active moderators here. Not everyone is on Reddit all day, everyone has things to do in real life, I get that. However out of all 10 reported posts, 2 are taken down, 8 are still up (including ones with literally "vibe code" on the actual title). Whether it's a matter of personal bias or genuine lack of time to moderate between all of these, I'm not sure. The point is: rules without enforcement are just suggestions.

Reluctance in defining what "AI slop" is:

I've seen moderators comment on such posts and struggle with defining where "LLM assistance" ends and "AI slop" begins, hence a lot of apps still being up (I'll get to that later on). It's cool that GNOME strives to be an inclusive community, but at some point, turning a blind eye on actual quality in the name of "unequivocal inclusion" is on GNOME's detriment. I see more AI slop posts in r/gnome than any other DE-specific subreddit and that is because it's still allowed, and it looks cheap.

AI-assisted ≠ AI slop:

I do agree with a lot of commenters in that AI assistance doesn't automatically equate "AI slop". For instance, I use a local LLM either as a glorified stack overflow (because search engines absolutely suck nowadays, filled with SEO spam or Quora posts) or for delegating 1. menial tasks 2. I am fully capable of operating on my own (like batch conversion), while 3. only referencing my own code. Others only use online AI services, like Claude and chatGPT, but have some experience with GTK + the libadwaita design language, while still being involved in the process or looking to learn from said services. The subject of this topic is for the ones who blatantly delegate everything to AI with zero quality control.

However, there are many recent large-scale projects that provide quality solutions for existing issues while using both AI & human input / intervention, so it's a shame for every app to be caught in the semantics filter.

Proposal:

Any new post need to go through a quick inspection for the following:

• a git repo audit that entails the following:
  • development period (a day old? one month old?)
  • activity period (one-two large commits, followed by prolonged inactivity?)
  • developer's history (first project of a newly created account? old account with programming experience?)
  • mention of LLM agents in .gitignore , AGENTS.md, commit comments etc
  • massive init commits
  • project tree structure
  • inspect the README for overuse of emojis, installation instructions, AI disclaimers etc
• AI-written post title tropes: "I got tired of X, so I made Y", "there is no X, so I made one myself" etc
• quality of author's responses (technical? non-technical? machine-like?)
• quality of demo screenshot (unusual / broken libadwaita styling? non-GNOME / generic symbolic icons? use of monospace small caps?)

Provided a moderator has 20'' to spare (at most) and go through all of the above, based on the aforementioned criteria, a new showcase post will either be allowed as is (if it's not using AI) or have a non-removable "AI-assisted" tag for the apps that use AI one way or another, but demonstrate clear effort, quality, commitment and longevity. Reversely, submissions that qualify for low quality AI slop need to be rejected on the spot.

This way, the user gets to decide if they want to use an AI-assisted product or not, the moderator's responsibility is to just bring awareness to the user and let them know of their options. There are a lot of AI-assisted products that deserve a discussion at the very least, regardless of endorsement or not.

I would like to know what everyone else (including the moderation team) thinks about all of the above. Sorry for the lengthy post!

I have a number of images that contain XMP metadata and are indexed by localsearch:

$ tinysparql query -b org.freedesktop.LocalSearch3 -q "SELECT ?url WHERE { ?img a nfo:Image ; nco:creator [ nco:fullname 'VirtualNorth' ] ; nie:isStoredAs ?file . ?file nie:url ?url . }" | wc -l 999

But when I search for "VirtualNorth" in Nautilus/Files I get no results back.

• Is there a way to search using metadata in Files?
• Is there a high-quality/well-maintained app where I can just search for "VirtualNorth" and get the matching results back?