Comment by zaphodias
2 months ago
I don't think there are humans involved. I've now seen countless PRs to some repos I maintain that claim to be fixing non-existent bugs, or just fixing typos. One that I got recently didn't even correctly balanced the parenthesis in the code, ugh.
I call this technique: "sprAI and prAI".
We will quickly evolve a social contract that AI are not allowed to directly contact humans and waste their time with input that was not reviewed by other humans, and any transgression should by swiftly penalized.
It's essentially spam, automatically generated content that is profitable in large volume because it offsets the real cost to the victims, by wasting their limited attention span.
If you wantme to read your text, you should have the common courtesy to at least put in a similar work beforehand and read it yourself at least once.
When you put it like that, what AI does in cases like this, is enable us all to treat each other like e.g. Google and Facebook (and any sufficiently big corporate-bureaucratic entity) has treated us for a long time.
We have reviewed your claims and found that [the account impersonating your grandma] has not violated our guidelines.
I hate this, my mom's account got hacked and now someone is controlling it for who knows what purpose. She had to make a new account and lost all her photos, old posts, messages, etc. Facebook was completely unhelpful
See Ghostty's social contract about AI use: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/HACKING.md#...
Suppose that Ghostty bans an account from contributing if it fails this test.
That still gives the next slopper a chance to waste the same amount of time. People used to call this the "one bite of your apple" attack -- it's only fair to give everyone a chance to prove that they aren't malicious, but if you do that in an environment where there are more attackers than you have resources, you still lose.
I was looking through my work email (my personal email is already too far gone) and realized 90pct of the messages were computer generated. Maybe not AI, but still all automatic process fired messages. I was looking for emails that were deliberately drafted by a human, not even sent only to me. Just messages that a human intentionaly made in the moment. Can't filter them out.
The worst is when your own employer starts spamming your email with useless crap. I would get several emails a day from HR or some other group about some event coming up that I had zero interest in nor asked to be notified of. Don’t forget to sign up for XYZ, check out what your colleagues are saying in Stupid Internal Social Network, and so on.
And worst of all, every “extra-cirricular” group was allowed to abuse the company-wide mailing list to promote their softball games or trivia or whatever else.
I noticed this a few years ago and decided to start giving any automated systems a special email address so I can filter automated email into a separate folder. I only give out my personal email address to actual humans. Its been a huge improvement to only see human-written emails in my inbox.
Pretty sure it's above 99% for me. Email is just a waste of time and a way to get phished these days.
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Uh that sounds awesome, but if humanity worked like that then things like actual spam e-mail and "robo-calls" would not exist, right? But they do, and they have done for a while. Sorry for maybe sounding cynical, but I have a really hard time believing in your prognosis.
Well, sure they exist, stealing and murder still exists too despite our best efforts to eliminate them. The point is that they are on the fringes of our society, I get maybe one spam email every few days or so and seldom bother to review the thousands trapped in the Spam folder. Robocalling never took of in my country either, and none of these scummy industries is receiving trillions of speculative investment like AI does. Social norms work, even imperfect as is their nature.
... and if we can't enforce it with social contract, we'll enforce it with AI on the receiving end.
You're absolutely right! There are no humans involved and I apologize for that! Let me try that again and involve some humans this time, as well as correctly balancing the the parentheses. I understand your frustration and apologize for it, I am still learning as a model!
Hey don't hate on us humans who genuinely do open random PRs to random projects to fix typos. https://github.com/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ahenrebotha+archi...
Thank you for your service o7
I’d love to know what your genuine motivation is. Is it a desire to genuinely improve projects? Because I’ve always had the impression that people who do this just want to boost their PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.
Not everyone is a developer. Finding and fixing typos benefits everyone and allows nontechnical people to participate in the projects to improve the software they use, even if they can't contribute code.
Genuinely, I am trying to improve things. Making documentation more readable has a real cascading positive effect. Of course, most of these PRs are tiny — just a word or two — but that means it takes me almost no time to submit them, so the ROI is still positive.
One of the most enraging things to me is when a text search of documentation fails because the word I'm searching for has been misspelled in a key place. That's one of the things I'm trying to solve for.
I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup!
Of course doing this does generate activity on my GH, but I think all of us have probably moved on from caring much about the optics of little green squares.
Also like someone else said, it's just fun. I like typing and making Git do a thing and using my nice keyboard.
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There's been a couple of projects with typos, that I wanted to fix but didn't for exactly the reason above!
Didn't want to be seen as just padding my github.
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I used to do this when I had more free time and I did it because I just enjoy doing it. When I write it down like this I realise it sounds kind of obvious, but here we are
I once submitted a typo fix, among other things, to XFree86 way back when. Talk about love of the game, good grief.
> PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.
This used to mean something, but I don't think it does anymore.
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I think there are humans that watch "how to get rich with chatgpt and hackerone" videos (replace chatgpt and hackerone with whatever affiliate youtuber uses).
It's MLM in tech.