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Comment by weli | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike every kind of rule that says something along the lines "if it's LLM generated you must self-disclose otherwise it is against the rules". Because this quickly leads to witch hunting and easy persecution of IC's under the pretense "it looks generated by an LLM" or they just investigate you and put you on cooldown from being able to contribute while they check for signs of "LLM-generated code". It's no different than laws giving any officer the right to violate your rights based on flaky probable cause "you have slurred speech therefore I will search your car to see any open containers". This can lead to a soft coup by anti-llm individuals which will make communities slowly drift towards a group of elitists that gatekeep any newcomer.

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I don't disagree with you. I too hate disclosing LLM usage. I hate giving free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM, and I've actually ended up sitting on reviewed and tested patches to open source projects because of this.

However, we should be polite and respect their house rules. They are being reasonable and even made an effort to preempt these exact objections:

> Harassment is not allowed.

> You may not harass people for using an LLM, regardless of whether or not their use is banned by the policy.

> Don’t try to be the police for whether someone has used an LLM. You are not required to “actively look” for whether an LLM was involved.

> There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM

I've seen so many arguments (mainly from non-developers) claiming that anyone who uses an llm to generate code doesn't know how to program. They can't understand the difference between people using an LLM to blindly churn out code, and people developing with an LLM to generate the boring bits

The drama around LLM use in game decompiling and other related hacking is very funny. I've seen "well maybe you should learn C++ instead of being lazy and vibecoding" a nonneligible number of times.

I have a decompilation project for Mega Man Battle Network 2... Claude decompiles it, and then we go over the code together line by line until I understand it, then I commit the commented assembly code and my hand written documentation to the repository.

Yet another thing I won't be able to publish I guess. Sigh.

Disclosure can't go away, i dont care if you say which model you used. But i think it's within any project rights to not accept any llm assisted contributions.

The disclosure is fine, it's this stigma surrounding LLMs that is a problem.

We'll yet see where the wind blows, but there's a real possibility of copyright issues for machine-generated code down the line.

> I hate giving free advertising to trillion dollar corporations.

Are you required to tell you used Anthropic™ (or whichever your AI provider of the month is) to generate this code, and not only that *an LLM* was involved?

A project I wanted to contribute to requried git trailers in the commit message.

  Generated-by: Claude Fable 5

Strengths and weaknesses of different models are helpful to know. And the model could be important later for legal reasons.

You can’t be upset because they want to know the truth, seriously. When a project has concerns about generated code, it is for a reason.

I'm not upset because LLM disclosure is mandatory. I'm upset about the consequences this has and how easy this makes for people to gatekeep new IC's under false and difficult to prove pretenses.

"This looks like AI, closed". And you as a new IC with no connections, no community visibility have no recourse to fight back against it. Anti-ai people love boasting about humans > systems and forget about those humans that will surely be negatively affected by this, even if low number.

If you are a new programmer who is just learning and spend time creating a PR for a project you have a lot of respect for and the first interaction is someone falsely accuses you of using LLM's then closes your PR you've now removed someone who could have genuinely grown into your community from ever joining.

Not only that but since now you are by default a suspect of having used an LLM (and you need to prove you didn't use one) why even bother not using one? You are going to get accused of it either way.

that is not what the policy says. it says "authors must disclose", "reviewers don't need to play detective", and "if a reviewer is not sure whether a post is LLM-created they should handle it privately, consulting mods". and the recourse is "go to this zulip channel", because closing a PR isn't the same as geting banned.

For the morale of the person who created the PR, closing every PR you make is pretty similar to just being banned

The "contributor poker" made by someone on the Zig core team is a good one. You're thinking from the perspective like yourself and how they might be affected negatively by this policy. The org is thinking about what's happening at scale and what policy is going to improve outcomes overall for them.

Are there some potential contributors who might be discouraged because of this policy? Probably. Will maintainers have less time wasted by obvious low effort changes and engagement? Also probably. A user of AI is, in the experience of many maintainers, way more likely to be lazy than engaged.

I don't understand this obsession with clear cut categorization. Systems always have a human component and while we like to collectively deny this fact from a tech-sphere, there are always humans that will make the final call and if anything we should encourage the use of human trust and judgement.

We have focused so much on technological advancement, but our understanding of human systems and building an environment of trust that is not eroded by perverse incentives atrophies.

Thats why they also added the no harassing about LLM rule. Im not sure how the moderators will actually discern AI use, but I imagine if the code is high quality they dont actually care if its LLM, they just want to stop the obvious spam of drive-by PRs from first time contributors.

imho disclosing use of LLMs is just being transparent and honest. is it that hard? deliberately hiding this should absolutely get you in trouble, because trust is the most important thing to have in open-source

as you probably have seen in TFA, the policy does not ban LLM usage. its just asking for disclosure so that maintainers know how much effort was put in a PR

and, please, open-source maintainers owe us nothing. refusing to merge a patch is not the same as cops searching your car. this is merely maintainers trying to evaluate how they should spend their precious time

> disclosing use of LLMs is just being transparent and honest. is it that hard?

Your assertion here is irrelevant to the poster's point.

You're focused on the "happy path:" everyone has perfect information and judges correctly. If the submitter used AI, they say so and the commenters on the PR agree. If the submitter did not use AI, they don't say they used AI, and the commenters on the PR agree. This is the diagonal elements on the "used AI" confusion matrix.

The commenter is pointing out that information and judgment are not perfect and they're concerned about the off-diagonal elements of the confusion matrix. Especially the "Didn't use AI, but some commenters believe that they did" element.

I agree with you that trust and transparency are important, but please understand that disclosure is not a simple matter.

There is stigma surrounding LLM usage. There are consequences. Disclosing can lead to harassment and direct harm to one's reputation. I've been called "slop fetishist" and "clanker lover" before.

yes. there's a reason there's exactly two things in the policy that are marked as moderation consequences and they're directly next to each other. "no harassment" doesn't work if people are paranoid that any PR could be LLM slop, and "disclosure is required" doesn't work if people are worried about harassment. you need both, and you need them to go into force at the same time.

Completely agree. Making harassment of LLM users explicitly against the rules was very welcome. It's something I haven't seen in other LLM policies. It instantly gained my respect.

I sort of agree, but sort of not. I do agree that any use of AI should be disclosed, but I have also seen some subreddits where the top comments of every post is either raging about the use of AI, or arguing about AI when AI wasn't used.

It's just so tiresome

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