I don’t want to read LLM output

Offtopic
1

Today I came across an announcement of a new package that turned out to be hundreds of words of LLM slop. It was unbearable.

Other fora have a hard rule against LLM-generated postings or comments, and they benefit from it. There are automated tools that detect LLM garbage with over 90% accuracy. This forum should implement automatic LLM deletion as a matter of urgency. I’m here to read questions and announcements written by human beings. If the trend continues I’ll stay away. That may be no great loss, but I’m sure there are others who feel similarly.

2

The Julia Discourse also has such a rule (source):

  • Don’t post generative AI outputs (but direct human language translation and minor editing is ok).

When you see such posts, please use Discourse’s “flag” functionality (as described here) to bring them to the attention of the moderators.

3

Could you tell us which announcement it was?

4

Can I ask that we please not do so?

Instead of discussing any specific announcements, can I ask that people flag posts that violate the Julia Discourse guidelines?

As the guidelines say:

Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

5

I don’t want to pick on someone who may not understand that he’s doing something offensive. I’m sure he had no intention to harm the discourse here. The flagging solution has not worked and clearly is not working. Instead of trying to sweep up the garbage after we’ve had to wade through it, why not prevent it from littering the landscape in the first place?

6

I’m aware that moderators have (deliberately) given packages announcement (as opposed to “normal” posts) a bit more leeway when it comes to being LLM generated.

Personally, I think we should stop giving such leeway. In particular, because as far as the General registry is concerned, an LLM-generated README is mostly against the guidelines. So, not letting people copy-paste that README here either would go some way of enforcing that guideline.

I understand that LLM-assisted coding is becoming more and more prevalent as the latest generation of models has gotten exponentially more capable. That mode of development can produce amazing results, as long as the maintainer guiding it puts in sufficient care and effort, and at this point it’s not something we can or should limit. But user-facing communication, which includes the README, non-reference parts of the documentation, and announcements here should still be written by humans and for humans, since LLMs still lack the judgement to effectively express the human author’s intents, or understand the background of the target audience. At the very least, these should be heavily edited from whatever an LLM drafted.