At this point it's impossible, so I concur with the parent: forget about the shutting it down and think of something actually realistic.
Now that doom is here, it's too late to do anything about it. Just accept the doom!
But yes, what you said but unironically. Like it or not it's here, it's not going away, so all the remaining options have to assume that.
You do very well in battles against straw men.
Obviously that's not what everyone argues, my point is that there's a lot of chaff in such arguments and not much wheat. People make a lot of noise about dramatic but completely unrealistic scenarios, while ignoring the far more boring reality.
The PauseAI people are for instance talking about human extinction, somehow. And not crappy GitHub PRs.
What doom? This is a mildly annoying problem that will likely be self correcting long term.
The question we should ask is why a subset of humans are so gung-ho about this technology when all it's done is induced mass misery at even a greater scale. We all know the actual answer to this: they want more money even if the costs is more societal misery.
Be careful tho, we already know people are willing to commit violence and if it's one thing you can count on in the USA is when economic conditions worsen more people become desperate. That desperation leads to pretty extreme reactions, and these reactions are typically adored by the public writ large too (see the public's Luigi reactions).
Quite the powder keg and I don't think SV realizes the potential backlash that they are brewing themselves.
Your other complaints seem more to do with concentration of wealth and capitalism, which AI is accelerating, but is not the cause of. Banning AI because unregulated capitalism is making people miserable would be like banning shipping containers to stop sweatshops.
But it does suck, you know? Part of what makes OSS so great is that anyone could contribute. If someone uses a thing, and finds something broken or a way to make it better, they could do that and then push it back up to the project and ideally have it merged so everyone can use it. That's what makes it awesome. The project benefits, the maintainer benefits, the coder benefits, the users benefit.
Now we have to stop that because lazy people can't stop shitting it up with generated PRs and trying to get money for not fucking doing anything.
Although I do want to push back mildly. I think this situation is a bit worse than just "it sucks", and if you extrapolate out to a world where every institution that's like open source gets polluted by the same fundamental dynamics, it's not quite doom, but it's quite a bit worse than "it does suck".
Why is it not realistic? Small teams do excellent work. Keep your team small and trusted. Only accept contributions from your team, and people outside your team who are personally vouched for by someone on your team. It's like climbing mountains or sailing or any other type of inherently risky activity--you don't go out with people you don't trust. It's eminently possible, you just don't like the idea of it.
Even pre-AI it was obvious that contributions have to be vetted for a bunch of reasons.
Public repos are read only except for contributors who have been given specific permission, and those permissions are granular e.g. in order of increasing damage potential:
- comment on issue
- create issue
- comment on PR
- create PR
- run CI against PR
- etc.
In other words, shut it down.
Not great for privacy or ad-hoc contributions, but I don't see a way out of the muck without some kind of trust net.
Sounds like you can't accept AI is here to stay
No. You go out the door, and then I clean it up, and you don't get invited back. That's how that works.
