None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)
The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
The site only states "There's only one rule: generative AI cannot be used in the creation of the project.", without defining any further rules, nor does it clarify the exact definition of "creation of the project".
Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
> The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.
"You must nail down every single detail in objective terms" is a dishonest requirement we, as engineers, reach for when we don't like something subjectively. It's petty. It's not honest.
If you're an engineer, you'll understand why it's not petty. You do not want ambiguity in engineering. If you cannot even define what it is that you're campaigning for, then it's just random ramblings with no substance. No one's going to take you seriously if you can't even define what you're asking of others.
You don't want ambiguity in a proper engineering project. In a simple webpage denouncing the slop machine and their prevalent sloperators, I've got more than enough to know i appreciate the initiative. I'm personally considering an actual boycott of anything remotely involving AI.
That's fine, but again, you need to be clear on where you're drawing the line. Because boycotting "anything remotely involving AI" means boycotting all mainstream operating systems (Linux, Windows, Android, macOS, iOS) - which means ditching smartphones completely and maybe even mobile phones completely (because I'm not sure if you can find a 4G-capable phone that doesn't use some sort of Linux-based OS).
But this also means you won't be able to work most white-collared jobs, as almost every such job these days involves operating a computer running a mainstream OS. But I guess there are still some jobs out there where you could be operating a legacy OS, such as as some banks and other financial institutions, maybe you could learn COBOL and work on mainframes or something.
And naturally your boycott would also include most of the modern web, because most web browsers these days have some sort of AI involvement or the other, not to mention most mainstream websites as well. So there's a good chance that even though you're working on old-school mainframes, you may still need to do your timesheets or taxes or whatever on a modern website. Or send emails at the very least. So most modern jobs would be a no-go.
So I hope you've got your line well defined, because "anything remotely involving AI" is a pretty loaded phrase that could completely cut you off modern technology and workplaces, and you could end up living the life of a hermit, or a medieval-era farmer or something. Which, I'm not saying is a bad or impossible thing - I know at least a couple of people who quit IT completely, took up farming and have gone off-grid - its certainly doable, so the question is, how badly you hate AI, and how far are you willing to go?
> Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
Any dependency on a vibe-coded library, however indirect, makes an application not 100% human made (since the application relies on the library for some of its featutes).
If that's going to be your definition, then it's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible to have a 100% human made program, unless you've personally hand-coded the entire OS, or you've verified beyond doubt that no vibe-coded dependency exist in the entire dependency chain - both build and runtime, direct and indirect.
I'm not sure how feasible verification of that would be, unless we have some "certified 100% human" certification program of some sort, with an external auditing agency or something - because you can't trust humans, they will 100% lie.
If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
Even if you actually consider the OS a dependency, which is a stretch
And hopefully vibe coding doesn't get as widespread to become hard to avoid it.
> If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users.
> You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code, and you can bet your arse that Google and Apple are too. So that just leaves the niche OSes, and although I don't know of their individual stances, the trust problem still remains - how do you know they're not using gen-AI in some shape or form, without some sort of formal certification and auditing system?
> That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users
I wouldn't really say that
> That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code
If it's accurately reviewed it's fine for me, although yeah, it wouldn't fit the 100% human definition.
Just as you can make GPL software for closed-source operating systems, though, I think you could ignore the OS in a definition of 100% human-made software.
We can agree to disagree, but pretty much every modern app uses dependencies at some level, and that's a problem for everyone. Sure, npm is probably the worst of them all, but even the so called "safe" Rust is very heavy on dependencies - just look at any popular Rust project these days. It's only a matter of time until a malicious or poor quality code makes its way in a popular Rust project... or any other project for that matter. Just see the state all the popular FOSS projects are in, they're all getting swamped by LLM-driven PRs, so much so that some projects (like Ladybird) have decided to stop accepting PRs completely.
The problem isn't just about whether or not the code is accurately reviewed, because under pressure, humans are bound to slip up - just take a look at what happened with the XZ project, it has now become a textbook example of how projects can be compromised. LLMs have made the situation worse, it's only a matter of time until we see a second or third Jia Tan due to the pressure maintainers are in - or we see more FOSS projects stop accepting PRs altogether.
In such a scenario, every dependency is a liability.
And if you ignore the OS, that means you're drawing an arbitrary line in the sand - because how would you define what consists of an "OS"?
Going back to our example app, what if the app's dependency is Qt, and if Qt has vibe-coded components - by your original definition a few comments ago, that would make your app not human-made. But many distros also include Qt components OOTB due to some dependency or other (eg for KDE), so that would mean the OS is also not 100% human-made right?
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)