In case anyone else was also confused by this: this is about code, not content.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Still a big deal
You can’t ban a certain kind of content on an open source decentralized platform anyway.
You can, but only on one specific instance :)
For now...
It's decentralized platform. Nobody has the capability to impose such ban beyond their own instance.
This is about the official codebase, both server/website and app. Anyone could fork it, but si far the original remains the most used service by far.
well that was quick.
Seems to be the standard.
Public statement: "AI is coming!"
3 days later
Redaction statement: "We heard you!"
Clearly, they were trying it on for size; see if the shit will stick. It's that or they don't use the internet or read news about it
did they do a public statement? i thought someone spotted dansup adding it in the log.
Good.
How would they know though? If I use Claude to make a contribution and tweak some things, it would be impossible to know unless I actively tell them I used Claude when generating my code?
"How would they know if my contribution is actually compatible with their open source license? I could just contribute code from an incompatible license, or proprietary codebase, without telling anyone." This was supposedly an actual argument against FOSS licenses back in the days. Yeah, you can't be 100% sure, but: You made your intent clear. And that's honestly what most people care about. Then all you need to do is do some rudimentary checks for quality and maybe do a quick vibe-check (heh) on the person contributing.
Thats interesting history, thanks for explaining!
Exactly. Even if it isn't immediately detectable, once it is you've run afoul of the rules twice, so you can get extra punished.
Okey thank you. My question was an actual question, if there was like a "tell" or something! :D
There's dozens.
Large commits, over documentation, and not being able to answer questions about the OR are good starts usually.
Those aren't really tells for someone just doing "tweaks" like they said. Or someone using a little "AI" like google search. Etc.
Ofc there will be obvious cases but in general there's no way to detect how code has been generated - especially since there's no such thing as "AI" in the first place.
My honest answer?
If someone is putting in the effort to tailor their LLM to produce results like that, I'm actually fine with.
I have yet to see an LLM thats able to do that by default. The only way you get there is have a human so close in the loop, theyre still doing the thinking work, but just not the physical typing. At least as I've seen, and I have less of a problem there.
The shelved things I have there are environmental, political, human factors, and stolen IP. Those are still fundamental blockers to me being okay with AI. But from a technical output, I dont have a problem with that limit
Prob banning ppl from running agents that are automatically pushing to github and spamming all day
If you've seen a typical GenAI pull request, it's blatantly obvious. If it has been curated well, sure it's probably not feasible to know, but "slop" is easy to tell, and the target users have very slop contributions.
Well yes it is obivous if it is vibecoded usually, but if you use it as a tool you write most of it by hand or have it help out with certain functions etc. I hope you get my point! :D
Presumably this is why it says "substantially generated by generative AI", a diplomatic way of saying "GenAI slop". GenAI isn't necessarily completely off the table, but a very common usage scenario is. Admittedly seems subjective, but it provides a criteria to save maintainers from having to review unreasonable contributions without them having to identify some more concrete specific issue that is likely there, but it's going to be hard to find.
Also, unless it is very digestable, then I wouldn't even trust myself to be vigilant enough to catch the real issue even if I looked. It does a good job of looking credible like it should be right, even when it isn't.
If it's not possible to know if a contribution is AI and it's a good contribution, it doesn't matter much. And if it's bad there's no point in discussing if it is AI.
It's impossible, I'll never understand why anti ai repos draw such a hard line instead of saying hey we won't even look at 1000+ LOC PRs or design reworks with no discussion.
Both of those are pretty reasonable policies that will kill most of the fly by AI requests.
Yes, and I do agree with this.
They won't...
Knowing piefed they were using AI, got called out, and are now "banning" it for the optics.
It would be worse if they actually believed it, but they probably don't.
Pixelfed not piefed, fyi
Hell yeah!
Ooo, I've never heard of Loops. I did try Pixelfed but found it way too cumbersome to be usable, at least fo rme.
Good. Instagram is filled with them to the point you can't tell what's real and what's not.
It’s about source code contributions. I’m pretty lazy sometimes about following post links, sometimes I worry about articles full of ads and other nonsense. But to not read the actual content of a relatively short text post is a level of laziness I have not yet achieved.
Ooof!! My bad lol
I'm extremely tired today and read that completely differently.
It was probably wishful thinking, borne of utter desperation to see that change made:-)
Too late. Deleated. And once you leave its easy to not go back.
You just staying on instagram then?