Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law
>It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn’t suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn’t a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don’t think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn’t settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague “mostly” in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.
edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting
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Please update with the [AIT] tag in the title.
What is AIT?
AI Topic. Discussions that involve AI as a main subject, as this one does. If you go to the detailed links in the sidebar, there are full explanations.
It means if the guy running Codeberg doesn’t like it. This is his fiefdom, not a public square. Make your own fiefdom for AI coding. You could call it Vibeberg.
LMAO! That’s hilarious and true. Look, until you own your own platform, with your own rules for said platform, or are a significant investor in said platform, then you are subject to the whims of that platform.
Those comments on HN are hilarious 😅 That site really works as a parody of bad tech bro takes if you ignore that most of them are sadly dead serious.
Huh. I mostly read people moralizing the use of AI and wanting to slap a scarlet AI on anyone who uses it while derisively using the terms “slop” and “vibe” to poison the well.
Huh. I mostly read the use of “slop” and “vibe” to be fair depictions
Except when you can’t discern the difference between hand crafted and AI-generated, but they insist on calling it slop. Then it loses all meaning, and becomes clear it’s just antagonistic slang used by the prejudiced. Same with vibe, when they use it to mean any use of AI in coding.
In other words, there is slop and there are vibe coded projects, but the most offensive use those terms universally simply to be derogative and incendiary.
I’m not sure anyone is insisting on calling things slop which cannot be discerned isn’t human-written. Like another commenter pointed out, it’s the obvious-slop that is the subject of ire.
You’d be surprised. The most egregious is when community members can’t tell, so they begin debating whether or not something “is slop.” Iif you try to point out that if they can’t tell then by definition that means it’s not slop, they will only get angry, insisting that the definition of slop is anything made by AI.
Looks like the bad HN commenter takes are leaking 😑
Same here. I think Lemmy is the den of vipers when it comes to hate and prejudice of AI.
I use AI a little here and there, and want it not to be the evil that it is. But it fuckin’ is. It’s going to cause so many problems and it uses tons of electricity. Worst thing for the environment since cars. And even if you ignore all of that, it just plain makes so many mistakes that even ignoring the societal implications… it’s lacking at best.
I used to think like you (seem to), until I started noticing just how oblivious everyone is to the downsides. Actually seems like a good thing to have some people “overreacting” imo. It’s better than billions underreacting. Ignoring everything else, what are we going to do as a society when 60% of jobs go away? You imagine it will be an easy fight getting a universal basic income or some form of socialist policy? I think millions are going to die during that fight, very much best case scenario. This is going to disrupt society in so many bad ways that it’s hard to even anticipate.
Worst thing for the environment since cars
…and yet, we get in our cars and go to work, play, vacations, and never think much about it. Economies would crash if there weren’t necessary means of transportation. I don’t disagree that cars are pollutive, even tho we have made great advances in controlling and mitigating a lot of the pollutive aspects, and I don’t deny that AI contributes to carbon emissions. Which is why I keep saying that AI needs heavy regulation, much like we did with the early years of automobiles to present day. Another consideration is that the internet displaces carbon emissions with people who work remotely at home, streaming vs physical media being produced, etc.
It’s better than billions underreacting
Oh, it is always wise to educate yourself, take steps to mitigate pollutive aspects in our lives. But I don’t think that throwing the AI baby out with the bath water is conducive, much like we’re not going to stop using transportation. So in order to get the best of both worlds, there must be regulation, as much as I dislike regulation.
So, like transportation, AI isn’t going away. There must be regulation. For example: If company xyz runs an AI data center, it must be powered by renewable energy sources by x %. And why not extend that to all data centers? During COVID, about 557 million workers, or 17.4% of global employment, worked from home. COVID should have been an eyeopener globally. Skies over cities cleared somewhat and in some instances, significantly. Animals returned to their native habitats in the absence of humans. We have the technology to do better. We are just greedy and shortsighted.
and never think much about it
Actually a lot of people do think about it. Which is what I’m really advocating for here. I don’t expect or demand AI to go away. What I see as the problem is the same as the root problem elsewhere: all or nothing thinking. Either AI is good or it’s bad. I want there to be a world where we don’t run full speed with AI, dismissing valid point from detractors. In a world where 98% of people are not thinking about the dangers of AI, I’m glad 2% are, even if sometimes they come off like zealots…
I feel the same way about video games. I love them, but I know it’s needlessly sucking away electricity just to entertain me. Not to mention the electricity used by the developers, artists, sound designers, composers, etc to create the game in the first place. They’re even worse for the environment than AI. And even if you ignore all that, they serve no purpose outside of the frivolity that is entertainment.
The worst part is that no one ever points it out. They’re all hyper-focused on AI to realize that video games are far more destructive, and have been for decades. With AI, at least, the productivity gains can be harnessed by taxing corporations that utilize it, to fund Universal Basic Income so everyone benefits, but there’s no productivity gains with video games - just productivity loss.
Oh well, I personally don’t think society will survive another decade, so I’m just going to enjoy my video games, and create more video games using AI, because my actions are a tiny drop in an overwhelmingly massive bucket I can’t even see the other side of.
They’re even worse for the environment than AI
…no. Likely not even close. You’re really saying that the likely ~10% of the world population playing video games an hour a day on average (admitted total guess but it cannot be super high) is going to exceed a technology that is getting shoehorned into literally everything? You cannot even search the internet anymore without these GPUs heating up to run AI for you whether you want it or not. Web searches are something any connected person does. You can hardly type a sentence these days without AI software running in the background. And that’s all only going to increase.
If the attitude is “fuck it we’re doomed regardless” then there’s no societal problem anyone can convince you to care about. I feel that way too sometimes but it really isn’t helping anything. It might be hard to contain that feeling for you, but I hope that changes. It overwhelms me a lot too. But I do hope we can fight that feeling off long enough to turn some key things around. The only hope we’ve got is to fight that fight.
Yes, video games as a technology are worse for the environment than AI as a technology. I think you don’t believe me because you’re conflating the technology of AI with the data centers being built for the express purpose of AI. Those data centers are much worse for the environment than video games, yes, but they aren’t necessary to have AI. AI can be performed using a fraction of the hardware used to play video games. I am very, VERY opposed to data centers, but I’m a huge proponent of both games and AI. So I’m being pedantic to make a point.
Thank you. I hope it changes, too. I’m just waiting impatiently for the Big Beautiful Day when I can read that Big Beautiful Obituary, and pop open a bottle of champagne and try to rebuild my hope for the future.
but they aren’t necessary to have AI
Does that matter if a thousand billionaires are building those based upon investors being convinced of the precise opposite? I’m not even sure what the truth is but it seems not all that important since I don’t get to decide what gets built. What I can do is have tiny influence on the people I speak to. I can make them aware of the problem and maybe that can bubble up to a larger understanding if enough people spread that awareness also.
Oh you’ll smoke a turd in hell for your insolence.
The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain.
The US Copyright Office has declared that it would not grant copyright protection to AI-generated material due to a lack of human authorship, but it is very far from being codified by law, nor does it say anything about the ownership of the material.
This is still a problem for OSS licensing, since in order to license a work you need to be the copyright holder.
This might mean that OSS projects find it even more difficult to assert their licenses against violators in court, since they would need to prove that the part of the code that was copied was not AI output.
Banning the output of AI tools in OSS codebases is a sensible move for any project that actually cares about enforcing the license that their code is released under.
At the very least it’s a mistake to say the law is “settled” at all. It’s barely been tested.
Indeed, this ruling says nothing about something being a derivative work, all it says is that AI generated works can not create new copyright claims, which is totally sensible and non-controversial.
The bigger problem is that AI tools have ingested a lot of copyrighted and FOSS code and totally will use that code in your projects. So even if AI output can’t be copyrighted, you are still on the hook if your AI copies copyrighted code into your own project. People will notice if your project just changed the variable names
Yes, that is what the term “derivative work” referrs to.
Please add the [AIT] tag - thanks!
This is just to let their prejudice flag fly. There’s no way to actually tell AI was used if the planning and assisting meta-data files aren’t committed to the repo. Nothing has truly changed. They might as well ban anyone who thinks about the color pink more then twice per day - it would be just as easy to enforce.
You might not be able to tell, but the signs something is LLM generated are pretty obvious to more experienced programmers.
Yeah, just like more experienced artists can see the AI generated pixels.
Are you trying to make some point? Because, yes they can.
Yes, I am. I have a global pre-processor directive for all of my prompts, so it always includes “match existing code style, formatting and conventions.” The result is indistinguishable from hand written code. Thinking you can magically discern what was written by AI is delusional.
Sorry but you are clearly delusional. There is no magic involved, just being able to look at the structure of the code and the pattern of the commits. It’s fairly easy in fact.
Oh, I see. You assume agentic AI that can perform it’s own commits. That would make it easy to tell, but you’d have to be really stupid to give AI such unfettered access to your repository.
you’d have to be really stupid to give AI such unfettered access to your repository
So 1) we absolutely know people are much stupider than that. and 2) doing exactly that has widely been observed.
And many, if not most, of the people vibe coding projects on git repos are that stupid. People who have never coded and never used anything other than
git clone. That is just a fact of many of the people who do it. They are the people who think they are tech geniuses because they once made an LED blink on arduino or made the millionth timer app.It is just a fact of who is flooding the most slop projects. There are plenty of people who use AI in subtler or more useful ways, but that is not what is the target of anti-vibecoding rules. It is the 1000 slop projects generated bloated repositories fully in 1 day that are killing bandwidth and storage limits for everyone else.
No need to assume that. Just by using LLMs to assist with code writing, the human in the loop changes their commit pattern.
That, plus, it’s driving away vibe coders just because they don’t want to be there. The rule doesn’t have to be enforceable 100% in order to be effective.
If copyright status is the reason, they should ban any, even a single-line AI contributions.
And it seems a short-sighted decision. Now AI is slop, but what about in 10? 20 years? They would rewrite TOS again?
And what about people they want to migrate from GitHub?
They would rewrite TOS again?
Yes, that is how that works.
And what about people they want to migrate from GitHub?
Slop to Microslop, code to Codeberg. That simple.
There are plenty of other public git forges you can migrate your LLM assisted projects to 🤷
