What are the rules? Is it okay to use autocomplete? Are spell checkers accepted? What if I used an AI chatbot to figure out something instead of a traditional search engine?
None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)
The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
The site only states "There's only one rule: generative AI cannot be used in the creation of the project.", without defining any further rules, nor does it clarify the exact definition of "creation of the project".
Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
> The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.
"You must nail down every single detail in objective terms" is a dishonest requirement we, as engineers, reach for when we don't like something subjectively. It's petty. It's not honest.
If you're an engineer, you'll understand why it's not petty. You do not want ambiguity in engineering. If you cannot even define what it is that you're campaigning for, then it's just random ramblings with no substance. No one's going to take you seriously if you can't even define what you're asking of others.
You don't want ambiguity in a proper engineering project. In a simple webpage denouncing the slop machine and their prevalent sloperators, I've got more than enough to know i appreciate the initiative. I'm personally considering an actual boycott of anything remotely involving AI.
That's fine, but again, you need to be clear on where you're drawing the line. Because boycotting "anything remotely involving AI" means boycotting all mainstream operating systems (Linux, Windows, Android, macOS, iOS) - which means ditching smartphones completely and maybe even mobile phones completely (because I'm not sure if you can find a 4G-capable phone that doesn't use some sort of Linux-based OS).
But this also means you won't be able to work most white-collared jobs, as almost every such job these days involves operating a computer running a mainstream OS. But I guess there are still some jobs out there where you could be operating a legacy OS, such as as some banks and other financial institutions, maybe you could learn COBOL and work on mainframes or something.
And naturally your boycott would also include most of the modern web, because most web browsers these days have some sort of AI involvement or the other, not to mention most mainstream websites as well. So there's a good chance that even though you're working on old-school mainframes, you may still need to do your timesheets or taxes or whatever on a modern website. Or send emails at the very least. So most modern jobs would be a no-go.
So I hope you've got your line well defined, because "anything remotely involving AI" is a pretty loaded phrase that could completely cut you off modern technology and workplaces, and you could end up living the life of a hermit, or a medieval-era farmer or something. Which, I'm not saying is a bad or impossible thing - I know at least a couple of people who quit IT completely, took up farming and have gone off-grid - its certainly doable, so the question is, how badly you hate AI, and how far are you willing to go?
> Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
This is dishonest (and very common). You may certainly argue that genAI content should count as human-made, but it's pointless to just gesture at pre-genAI tools like autocomplete and insist that other people do the work of comparing/contrasting.
It's OK to use the term "human made" to mean "not the output of genAI". There's no "gotcha" to be scored here.
i think you need to be more specific: if just the procedural generation was replaced or augmented with AI generation, would that be less acceptable? the procedural part is machine generated either way and everything else is done by hand as before.
the question here really depends on how much the procedural generator is an artwork in itself, and how much that would be lessened by using AI to generate the worlds instead.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)