Thoughts on answering/fixing AI LLM-created garbage code?

General
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In the past two days, I’ve responded to three posts where the person posted clearly AI-generated crap and wanted help debugging it. In the first, the person admitted it was from ChatGPT, and responded positively to encouragement to actually learn how to use Godot.

In the other two, the user acted like it was their code, but it was clearly not. (In the former, the included comments had suggestions on how to alter the code to the user’s needs. In the latter, the post started with the AI telling the user to post this pre-formatted question that was verbose but unhelpful.)

I want to be helpful, but I find myself being snarky while doing so. Like asking questions about their code I know they cannot answer. Probably not the best way to welcome people to the community. Is there a preferred way to respond to these posts as a community?

  1. Ignore them.
  2. Tell them that we don’t solve AI-created problems.
  3. Encourage them to learn Godot.
  4. Feed our answer through an LLM so it comes back unnecessarily long and verbose and complimentary. Then post that.
  5. Something else.
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Boolean having 3 value for GDscript
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For me the biggest deciding factor is how much effort they put into asking for help. If it’s literally just something like “Hey my code doesn’t work pls help” then it’s just obvious AI code, then it’s rarely worth helping since trying to nudge them in the right direction often won’t work. If all they ever did was ask AI, they likely learned nothing so unless you give them a fully working solution, they will just think you’re being “mean” for not giving helpful solutions like the AI.

However, if someone is genuinely trying to solve an issue, and in that process asked an AI but that didn’t help, I don’t mind spending a bit of time trying to guide them in the right direction.

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Hoo boy. Another AI thread dropped.

I really hope it doesn’t spiral or anything. :tractor:

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If someone uses AI slop code, it tells a lot about the effort put in the development itself, asking help from AI to explain parts of code, that’s ok, to use AI as a tool, no problemo, but to actually generate a full game logic without understanding what the code does, I don’t see the point of even starting learning game development or programming itself, that is why If you see AI slop code, and the author has no idea what that code does, I would ignore such questions, helping fixing the logic is ok or help with game development methods sure thing, everybody starts somewhere

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I agree with @tibaverus and @olekmandruk that people who are trying are worth helping. I’m more addressing the trend of the latter two posters where people basically want us to fix their vibe coding.

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I know GDscript, most of the code I made, I used Ai code early and I am sorry I wont use AI anymore, and that is the only thing I use AI on I am sorry

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I dont even use it that much I do most of the programming

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This one would be presumptuous of you. You could fix it:

Tell them that we I don’t solve AI-created problems.

The right way to handle it is to do what you enjoy doing.
If you don’t like the look of it you can ignore it (first in your list).
If it looks like a programming challenge you want to take on then go for it.
If you want to berate them for using AI, then do so (careful though, there is a tendency toward flagging posts for dubious reasons).

There is as yet still freedom in this world.

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Sure, but I believe that you and I are once again miscommunicating. :tractor: I’m not asking what I should do. I’m asking for a group consciousness like we did when we talked about how to respond to obvious AI answers.

If you want to do that and disengage from this discussion, feel free.

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No worries. I don’t care if you use AI. I use AI as a tool. It’s just hard to help people if they don’t understand what they created.

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I do, I know it might not seem like it but I dont use AI that often I only used it when debugging because that is what I am not the best at

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There really should be a high bar on when to use any sort of “group consciousness”; ie gate keeping.
Let me just remind everyone here what happens when a forum travels down this road:
Stack Overflow is almost dead

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This forum is known as being welcoming to people. Stack Overflow used to be much nicer back in the day. That and LLMs scraping it is its problem. Go compare your apples and oranges somewhere else.

This post is not intended to be gatekeeping. I am not trying to control access to answers for people who use AI. I’m trying to discuss how we can be helpful to people.

Sure, we could just say, “Do whatever you want.” And what most people currently do appears to be to ignore those threads or be snarky. That’s what I’ve seen happening. There is a HUGE bias against AI in this forum. If we want to continue doing that, and get a reputation for being elitist, cool. But just like we finally got the question template updated, perhaps discussing this can create some guidelines on how to direct people to get help.

Again, if you don’t want to be a part of the discussion, you do not have to be. But I am going to ignore you trying to kill this thread.

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Stack Overflow used to be much nicer back in the day

Yes, and if we head down the gate keeping group consciousness path, perhaps one day they will say,

godotengine.org used to be much nicer back in the day

There need not be a collective method of responding to any thread AI or other (apart from abusive, spam etc)
And If you add rules, you have to add moderation.

There has been no intent to kill this thread. My points are reasonable and valid responses.
Just because a person disagrees with your point of view does not mean you are under attack.
You must try to be brave dragonforge; discussion is not your enemy.

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LLM code being posted on here is not great. That said, it’s hard to moderate since using LLMs to produce code is the choice of whoever is programming. The most we can do is implore them to not use LLM code and find the satisfaction of producing code that works.

We shouldn’t not respond/ignore LLM generated stuff because if people don’t get an answer here, likely the next thing they’d turn back to is LLMs which economically is an issue because it isn’t sustainable for our environment to support LLMs.

A personal aside referring to this, a few months ago I decided to try to learn fabric modding for Minecraft since it sounded interesting. I didn’t have the skill in Java at the time to properly write code without a tutorial (and if you tried fabric modding you’d know that pretty much the only tutorials are kaupenjoe’s and nothing else). Without the knowledge to really apply what I learned I turned to Chat GPT to write the code since I had ideas I wanted done but couldn’t do it myself. Because I spent so much time using Chat GPT for that project I feel apathetic towards it because every success wasn’t mine. The project can’t really be considered mine. I wish that I had taken the time to learn Java and actually dive into modding in a way I could enjoy it, not have to turn to LLMs.

What we can’t do is lock away the knowledge of how to fix the problem, but what we can do is let them know what LLMs constrict them from learning and the benefits from writing code themselves.

Thank you for listening to my TED Talk. :tractor:

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Personally i dont care at all if someone used AI or not but the problem with users who just copy paste AI code into their game is that they don’t understand which part of the code they should include in a forum post. Like 300 lines of code but the only thing they have problem with is the four likes of respawning logic.

Not everyone has to be passionate about coding. Maybe some are very passionate about storytelling, art or music.

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I numbered them for ease of reference:

You can’t do 2. You just get the “Its not ai, but I do use ai, but its just a tool” etc.

You can’t do 3. You just get the “I am learning godot, ai helps me to learn”.

You can’t do 4. That is funny but it helps nobody and certainly not the forum.

You can do 1. However, there is a reason this is detrimental to the forum too. Should a newbie arrive thinking “Perhaps I could use godot, lets see how busy or responsive the forum is for support” tons of unanswered questions looks bad.

Its a good question. At the moment I do option 1. I just don’t engage with these types of posts. I think it is the least harm causing way forward. Not the friendliest though. It is a bit like trolling and I do find it quite offensive, that someone wants my help but can’t even be bothered to ask a proper question. It is very rude to be honest.

However, I think we just have to live with it. There are rude people everywhere and you can’t let them wind you up. I just hope it doesn’t get any worse than it is now, but I suspect it will.

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I think ignoring or sending them to Reddit or Discord is the path for me.

I also agree with @sancho2 about not homogenizing the forum as it lives off of individual people spending some of their free time here to actually help others. While I understand @dragonforge-dev general intention (i hope <3) I’d really recommend to visualize a clear individualistic approach to this.

Also, I want to note, that I do find your posts @Demetrius_Dixon not really helping either the discussion nor the flow of reading through such a topic. I don’t want to offend you, but please check your intention and impact on a forum like this by acting this way.

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I learned programming by watching Roblox Lua tutorials, which sounds completely silly in comparison to watching plain Lua tutorials, which sounds completely silly in comparison to reading Lua manuals, which sounds completely silly in comparison to reading Lua’s documentation.

However, all of the above are valid and eventually lead you to the same place, docs. Thus, I understand the appeal of AI as a learning method to newcomers, even though, to me, it sound silly in comparison to everything above. But truth is, I could have been one of them if I had gotten into programming in this era.

I do think that AI, though, introduces the illusion of “doing anything & everything for you”. That’s where people get confused. They go in with the predisposition to “just learn” from the tool and end up expecting it to solve their problems. This is also an issue of tutorials and manuals, they intend to teach you the core knowledge while also being overly specific about a problem they solve and hand out to you. The difference of AI, as I said, is the illusion of being able to do this same thing but for anything you would imagine, thus disabling your further more to actually act by yourself.

In the end, anyone that takes it seriously, ends up in the docs page of what they want to use. Sure, tutorials and examples will come before that; essentially, docs are just tutorials and examples but official. AI may also be added on top of that these days, I guess, but here’s my word of caution about it:

  • AI answers are formed from human answers but not curated by a human, as a tutorial.
  • AI answers are overly specific to a system and may not serve your specific need.
  • AI answers are overly general and may not serve your specific need.
  • As you’ve seen above, there’s a contradiction; that’s because AI contradicts itself, it has no brain.
  • AI works, at its core, through confirmation bias. That is, they will answer you what you want to hear, not what you actually need to hear.
  • AI is bad for the planet in a much more deeper level than other services.
  • AI is bad for your wallet, if you’re paying for that foolery.
  • I’m not an old boomer telling you to go back to paper and hand cranks. I’m probably as if not younger than you and still acknowledge this.
  • If you’re not convinced about my yee old arguments or my young guy advice, let science speak to you:

AI is useful for many things (like medicine!!!), but not for ACTUAL programming. May you learn with it? Probably, you’ll still have to rely on human resources to check the accuracy of AI results, but go ahead. Don’t bother, for now, trying to make something out of it, we’re already full of “garbage code” that’s not even AI-made. :face_with_tongue:

I wanted to give this reply just to say: don’t incur in this kind of discussions, just maybe… copy and paste the samey answer. They are shading actually meaningful discussion on the forum that’s not related to anxiety about AI solving our problems or not. Go and try, please, try to use AI. You’ll quickly clear your mind about its uselessness (as for now).

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I numbered them in the post for you as well.

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