I don’t want to read LLM output

Meta Discussion
130

Yes, we both are, don’t give that up so easily. It’s even written down:

That’s you, that’s me too.

Which ones? I reviewed all the recent announcements and none of them were bothersome to me. You could DM me with examples if you’d like.

A practice we should encourage, as described in the Guidelines document? ("The additional guidelines here are not hard and fast rules … ')

Spam is not the same thing as package authors using LLMs in their announcement threads. Let’s again review what was proposed initially: automated deletion of posts based on an LLM deciding whether it thought the statistical signature of a post classified it as “LLM generated”, a classification with no agreed upon definition at this time.

I am an “AI user”. My engagement in this thread has been sincere.

Whatever line you envision, I doubt it’s where @LeePhillips drew it when he opened this thread: criticizing an announcement he won’t identify, and calling it garbage.

131

stevengj was obviously speaking as a steward in context, and it is not “giving up” to acknowledge that 1) we are and were never stewards, and 2) the stewards (and moderators) have far more say on how this forum runs than the rest of us do. More misinterpretations of select lines out of context do not change that reality.

It’s not, my first comment (link says #89 but the sidebar says #88) in this topic was criticizing automated LLM deletions and warning against overconfident scrutiny from various “hard and fast rules.” Reading up on Pangram has actually shifted my stance a bit since, but I remain skeptical of having no flexible human in the decision. None of this contradicts my observation/opinion of the guideline against AI-generated posts having been a large net benefit.

As LeePhillips has declined to publicly identify the post out of concern for dogpiling, I couldn’t possibly corroborate his claim. I’ll also decline to identify the posts I have suspected, even if limited to DMs, because I also believe it’ll do more harm than good. I’ll just try to be better about flagging the more egregious suspects from now; that’s about all I can “operate” this site.

132

I worry AI will soon outstrip human expertise entirely, making niche technical forums like this obsolete, where humans will be cornered to the off-topic section to discuss about how they feel.

133

No worries. We had a less heated, more productive discussion on Slack, where several people said (me included), that we would not vibe code ever. Maybe use tools like (but not limited to) AI to identify bugs and errors, but always code ourselves.
I personally also try to limit usage of such packages. Yes I use DocumenterLandingPage.jl – very openly stated it is vibe coded – but it looks fancy and fanciness is the thing I care about there.
In anything numerical (my usual field) I do not care how fancy the numbers look, but that the code robustly works. When no human has ownership and overview on the code, at least I do not trust that.

I think this can be extended the same way to forum writing in the same manner. Using tools is ok if you feel that that improves how you are understood. “Vibe posting” not. Also not assisted vibe-posting, in my opinion.

134

To access useful software, I’m used to tolerating many forms of poor communications. I actually find LLM-generated READMEs to be a bit more readable than Unix man pages and Richard Stallman’s philosophical writings.

135

Sure. One reason the discussion is long and also not easy is that all this is a spectrum.

I get super annoyed by LLM Readmes, but I am not only German, I am northern German – we are usually super short in communication.

136

Gauss was also from northern Germany, and he wrote, “You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length”, which is exactly the opposite of LLM slop.

137

You are a prolific writer, @Benny. By no means am I planning to compete with you in this area. However, let me clarify a few things, because I have a feeling that you are misinterpreting some of my posts or trying to rewrite some of my sentences (re: your post #122).

I can’t speak for Matt. However, in his post #104 he clearly wrote that his viewpoint evolved over time. I recall him being highly enthusiastic about the Julia implementation of AlphaZero and expressing positive views both on Julia Discourse and even in some Julia promotional videos about ML/AI. At the same time, I also recall his highly critical posts written relatively shortly after, mostly about LLMs, initially bordering on outright disbelief in these new tools and their abilities. This is a highly polarizing technology, and based on what I’ve been reading, attitudes towards it vary significantly among people from different countries. My point here is that probably people will learn from each other and mostly on their own about the best way to use it.

Nevertheless, I’m struck by the amount of criticism on Julia Discourse on this topic. My understanding is that most of the participants here are representatives of leading research institutions, and the language’s roots are tied to what is arguably the leading technical university in the world. Again, as of now, I personally think that Julia is part of the information technology industry, and “LLMs” are driving current development in this space. So it is a bit surprising to me that we, as a community, are barely participating.

138

That is an interesting remark upon which I see no one better suited to reflect than the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856) in his Reisebilder (engl. Pictures of Travel), where in the Third part, Chapter 13 he writes about the inhabitants of Norderney, a German island in the North.

Remarks upon the people of Norderney in a translation

That which connects these men so firmly and contentedly, is not so much the inner mystical sentiment of love, as that of custom — that mutual " through-and-above-living" according to nature, or that of social directness. They enjoy an equal elevation of soul, or, to speak more correctly, an equal depression, from which result the same needs and the same desires, the same experiences and the same reflections. Consequently, they more readily understand each other, and sit socially together by the fire in their little huts, crowd up together when it is cold, see the thoughts in each other’s eyes before a word is spoken, all the conventional signs of daily life are readily intelligible, and by a single sound, or a single gesture, they excite in each other that laughter, those tears, or that pious feeling, which we could not awaken in our like without long preliminary explanations, expectorations and declamations. For at bottom we live spiritually alone, and owing to peculiar methods of education, and peculiar reading, we have each formed a different individual character. Each of us, spiritually masked, thinks, feels and acts differently from his fellow, and misunderstandings are so frequent, that even in roomy houses, life in common costs an effort, and we are everywhere limited, everywhere strange, and everywhere, so to speak, in a strange land.

Heine’s text contains a warning against praising shortness in expression as a virtue: conformity and boundedness of thought. “Make not many words, because we (already) know what you will say and what needs to be said,” looms behind that praise of shortness.

Clearly, this community and this place (a club with rules) has every right to demand that “human authorship only” is enforced in a rather strict way. But there is a price to pay, because (as has become clear by now) it is not only about “slop” nor “clarity of exposition” nor “originality of content” that the community cares about. The call for “authenticity” and (visible) “human fallibility” will not only get rid of “slop”, it will likely also get rid of new ideas and maybe even better arguments. This site is named “Discourse” and I am explicitly reminded of Popper’s call to allow for criticism as broadly as possible, irrespective the source. Refute critique for bad reasoning and false facts, but do not ban it for suspicious number of em dashes or strange use of vocabulary (even if correct according to Webster’s).

It seems that the issues this thread has raised are already being recognized and addressed by the social sciences. I have added some interesting papers in this regard below. From cursory reading I find that it is normal that AI use in communication is “penalized”, e.g., you earn less trust. Interestingly, the scientists even found a paradox in this regard: People would call for make AI use transparent, but would penalize people, who did so, providing an absurd incentive to hide the use of AI (cf. my post, which was automatically (!) hidden without me being given any official statement or simply staff approval so far).

There seems to also be some risk of McCarthyism according to the papers, e.g., people use the “AI-found-inside” label to suppress what they do not like or want to see. While it has been denied in this thread, sociology appears to be crisp and clear in this regard: Determining who gets to say what and how is a form of wielding power in societies (and communities). Interestingly, while people mistrust computers and AI, the measured effects of AI assistance in the communication setting studied by Hohenstein et al. (see below) were mostly positive even while suspected AI use itself produced negative evaluations.

Outside this forum, the argument will increasingly be settled differently. Developers, employers, clients, and entrepreneurs will compare what people can accomplish with whatever tools they choose to use. They will not award bonus points for avoidable friction, nor mistake inefficiency for humanity.

Suggestions for further reading
  • Baert, P., Dorschel, R., Hall, M., Higgins, I., McPherson, E., & Philip, S. (2026). Dialogues Towards Sociologies of Generative AI. Social Science Computer Review, 44(1), 59-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393251370354.
  • Jeffrey T Hancock, Mor Naaman, Karen Levy, AI-Mediated Communication: Definition, Research Agenda, and Ethical Considerations, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 89–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz022.
  • Siavosh Sahebi, Paul Formosa, Sarah Bankins, The AI penalty and disclosure paradox: Trust, authenticity and knowledge uptake in AI-mediated communication,
    Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, Volume 8, 2026, 100304,
    ISSN 2949-8821, Redirecting.
  • Hohenstein, J., Kizilcec, R.F., DiFranzo, D. et al. Artificial intelligence in communication impacts language and social relationships. Sci Rep 13, 5487 (2023). Artificial intelligence in communication impacts language and social relationships | Scientific Reports.
  • Watson, S., Brezovec, E. & Romic, J. The role of generative AI in academic and scientific authorship: an autopoietic perspective. AI & Soc 40, 3225–3235 (2025). Client Challenge
139

Interesting detail.

Yes I personally do not mind if someone uses AI as help, but I strongly oppose both the pure-unreflected use of AI generated stuff and advertisiing/promoting to do the same (or even worse arguing I just do not pay enough yet to see how cool everything is).

Concerning the mention of friction. I could only find the version in Norwegian: Når friksjonen forsvinner – where one claim is that friction is necessary in learning – and in my opinion also in research.
Sure not all code is research. Mine in large parts is both learning (for me) and using it to accompany my research.

So avoiding friction is – like in many points and arguments in this thread – not always what is wanted.
And from what I for example currently experience myself in teaching (as a lecturer) is students opposing AI and not using it in order to not “skip” a learning effect.
I do not have a source, but my feeling is the same for personal communication – and for myself also concerning code. I want friction. I also do not care about bonus points.

PS: Whether Brunswick is Northern German is a bit of a debate :wink: but that is really of topic here, where which group of germans draw the line of “northern Germany ending”.

140

Wow, I am jealous!

141

Y’all, you are the community! Everyone here! Yes, that includes both Kahli and Lee and Ronny and Guido and everyone in between. Yes, there are widely diverging views, and obviously not everyone will agree, but we’re unified in our guidelines and community standards (and of course our use of Julia!).

The guidelines aren’t changing and haven’t changed since December of last year when we added this bullet.

And, yes, to be clear, if your usage of the generative tool passes the Turing test and adds to the conversation in a relevant and concise way, that’s just fine! Minor editing and human language translation are good examples of such usages and that’s why they’re explicitly okayed. It’s also important to note that — as is now hopefully more fully emphasized by the first change — this is a rough guidelines and not a hard and fast rule. This also just applies to the text you write on this forum, discourse.julialang.org, and not code or content elsewhere.

You’ll note, this isn’t proscribing AI use entirely! We have just always asked folks to think about what you’re saying and if it adds to the conversation. Oneshotting a chatbot is clearly not doing that. But obviously there’s a lot of shades of gray between that and taking a half hour to compose a message (as I just did here).

Many of you are looking for a line and trying to find it. You won’t find it. This isn’t an automated system and it’s not going to be perfect. But we’re trying our best.

142

I mostly don’t want to read AI/LLM announcement posts because I dont want this discourse to turn into an AI Bar.

This is currently happening in Bevy too. I don’t like it. See also It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday – fallible

143

A couple of points:

But first, the only AI I have ever used is the AI at the top of an Internet search. I have never used a chatbot to this point in my life. I try to understand how the technology works, but so far no direct experience.

Getting back to basics, humans are creative, LLM’s learn from humans, and then make a prediction on what token comes next. Agents guide in this process. Yet the core of the machine (AI) comes back to human creativity. It seems that the crux here is whether we should use our own creativity for this forum or outsource it. This is obviously not totally black and white, with AI translations, etc. It seems the forum moderators have elected steer closer to the former.

A college student I know had to write an essay. It came back that the AI detector said it was AI generated and he was given a zero. He was able to show with his outline and background work that it was written by him and the instructor accepted that. Then he checked some of his early high school essays and the AI checkers also said that they were AI generated. I have no clue what AI checker they used.

If I want to think through an issue, I can think more clearly if I express myself in the written word. To do that I need to struggle with what the issues are and what my thoughts are. It helps me to eliminate contradictory thoughts and flesh out my own thoughts more completely and rigorously. There is that required friction mentioned above.

If someone else writes something and I post it, it does not have the same level of critical thinking, the same level of friction involved in it. I can critique it, but that is still different. I think the same is true of AI generated content. If I then press the post button, I may be accepting responsibility for what is posted, but that is fundamentally different than having gone through the process of thinking it through for myself, what I really believe.

I thank the moderators and the stewards for thinking through what is acceptable, in trying to keep the forum human. I wish them the wisdom of Solomon.

144

I personally stopped using AI to assist at all for package announcements or [ANN] updates because I just found it was easier for me to put something together quickly that captured exactly what I was trying to express. Even if I’m not the best writer, it still was much easier to quickly digest than what an LLM was producing even after many rounds.

However, there is a big difference between just generating something in one shot and iterating so many times you cannot reasonably tell it was produced by AI anymore. The important thing is that effort and care went into shaping it into something that is actually useful. I do feel like its possible to put together a high quality README mostly using AI with many rounds of refinement. If the end result is sufficiently elegant in what needs to be expressed and flows naturally, that seems to me like it should be sufficient.

To a certain extent I feel like AI vs no AI is the wrong distinction here, it’s the quality of the end result. I’m making sure to not overwhelm others with “slop”, to communicate the essentials of what I’m trying to say in a precise and direct manner, without the obtuse roundabout rhetoric that you so often see LLMs generate.

145

The viewpoint there seems to lean harder toward AI skepticism, and a game engine having “a relationship to people outside of software” might be a relatively unusual influence on their perspective of software contribution. Nevertheless, we can recognize many of the observations:

During this period a lot of LLM enthusiasts started openly dreaming about even more permissive policies, what they would do once full agentic modes were allowed…the assumption is that there will be a next, more permissive LLM policy, so why trust it?

There isn’t trust that our positions are held in good faith, instead that we will merely lash out in existentially threatening ways that do not “address the reality” or “have real arguments.” This has extended to the point where merely asking if a PR is LLM Output gets push back, despite disclosure being a part of the current policy.

The inherently stochastic nature of these models makes so-called “hallucination” an intractable problem. But true believers imagine they don’t need to worry about this, insisting that people will check their work even when people have little emotional buy-in to carefully and fully understand “AI” output, and may not have enough time.

“But that’s not me; I respect rules, feedback, and time,” anybody here could claim, and overgeneralizations are indeed wrong. I personally recognize good communication and use good projects that owe a lot to LLM assistance, including Julia. However, a serious argument about the potential far-reaching harms of writing a few paragraphs from the heart a couple times a week in one isolated forum might be a sign that our values have slid toward the slop horde in the last few years.

It’s worth highlighting that the “last 4 months” and especially the “last 2 months” of the observed degradation of the Bevy community predates the relaxation of the AI policy to foster AI-assisted software development 5 weeks ago, and despite standing firm on some sensible points like quality, accountability, and art and communication among humans, the situation apparently deterioriated further:

The #showcase channel is no longer worth looking at, and is demoralising if you value growth and learning more than final artefact. A significant number of the posts are about “AI”-driven projects. A place where people would hype each other up about learning is now mostly an LLM-enthusiast space.
We see a similar thing in r/rust and other link aggregation forums, there is less enthusiasm now that there is a greater volume of low-effort posts.

That’s just the practical reality of the LLM market today, no matter how many examples of ethical usage we drum up. The sheer speed of LLM generation means that even a minority of participants emphasizing the wrong half of “using LLMs to build ___” will have no difficulty or qualms drowning out everyone else, LLM users or non-users alike. They may struggle to tolerate criticisms and de-escalate, a known risk of conversing with bots (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.01395). Top social media platforms with vast resources and increasing burdens on good-faith participants are still struggling to curb spam, so I don’t think any AI policy or enforcement is going to do better at scale, let alone work to everyone’s satisfaction. However, maybe we shouldn’t give a debatable inch to save a trivial amount of work when everywhere else is warning us about the people who will take an unreasonable mile.

146

Is it possible that the announcement that the OP refers to was the AI-hallucinated one (and it was subsequently deleted) ?

If the discussion here is driven by completely different ideas about what the offending announcement looked like, then that would certainly explain a lot of the controversy…

147

Well I asked the OP if they would share the details so I could do some research on LLM detection algorithms but they did not take me up on it. I would hope that we wouldn’t suggest auto deleting people’s posts based around something like your hypothetical situation.

I think it would be very fair to have in the guidelines a policy such as “Don’t post announcement topics for packages that don’t exist, have not been written, or do not exist in a source code repository”

I doubt that anyone would have an issue with such a policy, unlike what’s been discussed here. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that would be flagged and removed promptly, without any extra mechanisms, LLM detection, etc. It’s also to the best of my knowledge been an extremely low probability event?

148

I think this situation is already well-covered in the Guidelines by this line under “Always Be Civil”

  • Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

Surely, posting ANN’s for non-existent packages counts as spam.