As a review, I want to highlight the constructive feedback:
- Overwhelming majority support some kind of tagging to identify AI projects and discussions
- A small portion have mentioned a preference for a “Not AI” tag, specifically for project promo posts to make it an active choice
- Too many tags would make it too complicated
- A tag for AI topics as well as a tag for AI projects would be helpful
- A variation of [AI] is preferred by folks who commented on tag naming
- A tag is not enough, how they used AI is important
- A tagged post should not have drive-by comments that don’t add to the conversation
For those who want “no AI ever”, that isn’t really possible. I’d recommend starting a new community, as so many critical pieces use AI in some capacity (linux, openssl, mariadb, curl, node, go, etc) that it would be a very different, hyper-specific community.
My recommendation based on what was said:
- Three tags:
- [CBH] - Code By Human - A promo post with a project that did not use AI in any capacity.
- [AIP] - AI Project - A promo post with a project that used AI in development in any capacity. Disclosure is required for how it was used.
- [AIT] - AI Topic - A discussion topic that includes AI. This is for items like “I want to customize a model to evaluate fish happiness based on CV captures” or “I’m having trouble configuring this MCP”
Posts that are not promotional and do not involve AI would not require a tag.
All promo posts would require a tag, making it an active decision to put [CBH] or [AIP], and would become kind of an extension of rule 7.
For [AIP], there would be a disclosure followup. I’m thinking something akin to the candor.md/ai-declaration.md approach, and this structure is based on that. The poster would need to identify which part of the process used AI:
- Design - architecture, system design
- Implementation - production code
- Testing - writing tests, test plans, and QA.
- Documentation - Docs, comments, readmes, changelogs
- Review - Code review and pull request feedback
- Deployment - CI/CD configuration.
And then the level (human only elements can be skipped):
- Hint - AI suggested solution, human does the task.
- Assisted - AI acts on part of a task, but a human handled the bulk.
- Pair - About a 50/50 split of human made and generated.
- Generated - a human prompted, the llm generated. (I see no substantial differentiation between Copilot and auto from ai-declaration.md for our use case, so I renamed to ‘generated’)
The requirement would be to call out only the parts which used AI, and the level of AI involvement for that process. So lets say there was an post tagged [AIP], and lets also assume there was a working automod to make this comment:
It looks like you’ve posted a project with the [AIP] tag.
Please reply to this comment with your AI Disclosure as described in the [AI RULES POST] (this will be a link), required for all [AIP] posts.
Identify which parts of the process involved AI (Design, Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Review, Deployment) and the level of AI involvement (hint, assist, pair, generated). See the [AI RULES POST] for details. Additional notes on use are welcomed if you’d like to provide them.
The [AI Rules Post] would contain the details above, just like the expanded rules post/explanations.
Failure to provide a disclosure after using the tag would mean removing the post. It could be locked, but I would have to assume the majority of the spam-type postings that happened to make it past the rule 7 criteria are the ones who will not provide the requested disclosure. I think it makes for a good filter this way, but please comment if you think otherwise.
In terms of timing, I’d say an hour should be more than enough time to provide a reply. If there isn’t one, then the post should be reported so it could be removed. Removals, as always, will be by a person, so they will be at some point after the hour limit.
I’ll likely make a crappy little bot in python to handle the tag check, check post_id to make sure it hasn’t already replied (this way if it gets edited in it will still comment) specifically for the [AIP] tag only. It won’t do a single thing otherwise. If you know of an existing (and good) bot for this, please share, or be subjected to the roughly 50 lines of code I wrote this morning. If I do use mine, I’ll put it up on codeberg so everyone can see exactly what its doing… and then get mad and tell me there is a better way.
Speaking of, I’ve made a repo for /c/selfhosted, currently with just the detailed rules post. I’ll put other information there later, such as the AI rules post, the comment bot (if applicable), etc. This will also go into the sidebar once I’ve had time to update the README and other details.
Please respond with your questions, comments, and criticisms
Sounds like too many rules to me. I’d recommend a “no low effort ai” rule.
Also, AIT is regularly used to abbreviate AI Tool
I think anything over the “assisted” threshold in the OP is low effort and should be dumped.
The only ones with extra effort will be promo posts, and this disclosure is regularly requested of them anyway.
You’d also need to define “low effort ai”.
I don’t see that working, sorry.
Asking people to tag AI, and also have a few different AI tags, and also read more than 3 sentences…mods are going to be busy enforcing the rules.
That would be me, yes. And considering what I already get reports on, this makes for clear practice and would overall reduce the issues that are currently out there.
Normally I’d agree, but the tagging rule won’t affect the majority of posts. I think it’s an acceptable complication, in this case.
Especially with how much vibecoded spam is in the horizon.
Vibecoded spam is deliberately engineered to look “high effort,” so even with the vagueness of such a rule, it wouldn’t cover the spam so well.
How would the proposed rules help? Isnt spam already covered regardless of AI?
Because, with a cursory glance, it doesn’t always look like spam.
A classic example I see starts with “I built a…” in the title, has a wall of text in the description, and actually promises to do something interesting. Only upon deeply inspecting the code (or trying it yourself)… it becomes clear it’s hallucinated nonsense.
And it’s not always malicious, either. A lot of devs get deep in AI psychosis and truly believe they’ve building something revolutionary with their vibe coding agent.
And sometimes these projects are interesting!
Hence it would be EXTREMELY helpful to have this tagged, up front. To me, an [AIP] is gigantic red flag to warrant extra caution, but not necessarily a smoking gun, and would help “regular” homebuilt projects stand out from the vibecoded ones.
And [AIT] is just nice to have. Some users don’t want to see any AI in /c/selfhosted, period. Hence AI discussion posts get reported as spam because people interpret it as spam, and this would clarify that nebulous distinction, while giving those users a way to easily filter AI posts out.
I wish the mods best of luck with implementing and enforcing this.
AI generally doesn’t need a lot of special handling when it comes to policies. It’s like any other tool, it’s just made it a lot easier for people that don’t know how to code get something made.
If anything, it might be easier for people to tag their level of experience.
Maybe, but even experienced devs seem to want to fall into the trap of thinking their expertise will mean they can skim review AI code and spot it’s mistakes rather than taking the time to properly review and understand the code. Low effort is low 3ffort regardless of your expertise.
Vibecoded self promo is a growing, specific spam problem though.
And a appreciable fraction of Lemmy/Piefed is “anti AI absolutist.”
I think that’s pretty unique.