this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 developers battling "AI slop code pull requests" (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Valuy@lemmy.zip to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 27 points 3 months ago

Use of AI tools for research and reverse engineering purposes is permitted. However, contributors are expected to fully own and understand all code they submit. Any communication with the team — including code, code comments, and GitHub comments — must come from the human contributor, not an AI agent acting autonomously.

We have unfortunately seen a rise in untested and unverified AI-generated slop being submitted to this project. This wastes maintainer time and, in worse cases, such changes get merged and break functionality for all users. Repeated violations will result in a ban from the repository. Please be respectful of everyone's time.

Pull requests opened by AI agents or automated tools must include a disclosure in the PR description stating the scope of AI involvement — which parts were AI-generated and what human testing or review was performed prior to submission. PRs that omit this disclosure may be closed without review.

If you are unsure about your work, open a discussion issue to talk it through with the team, or reach out to a maintainer on Discord.

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why do people do that? Is it fun or something? I've been using AI a lot lately, but ONLY on my personal projects. I've never submitted a single PR to any project with AI. It just feels wrong to be honest.

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Probably different reasons to do so. One reason I can imagine is, some users of Ai submitting slop genuinely think they are helping and don't know how bad the situation is.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 18 points 3 months ago

Or just wanting to have a bunch of PR's in their portfolio

[–] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

They can't code but want a feature/fix implemented and the dev team is limited?

[–] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Unpopular opinion: RPCS3 is the best Playstation 3 emulator.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

Isnt that the very popular opinion?

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

... Are there others?

[–] artyom@piefed.social 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Not to be dramatic but, is this the end of open source? Or at least the open contribution systems? I feel like I see this story every day now...

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Almost certainly not. All you would really need to do to stop this is limit who can submit pull requests to verified devs. Things go back to the way they were during the clunkier, before times when everyone used Subversion, when there were more hoops to jump through to contribute code. Make it so you need an existing contributor to "mentor" first-time contributors (making sure they aren't an AI, are writing competent code that follows project standards, etc.) before giving access to submit dozens of pull requests.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 4 points 3 months ago

All you would really need to do to stop this is limit who can submit pull requests to verified devs.

That seems like it would greatly limit the number of contributors, and especially over time, since you'd never have any new ones.

[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 months ago

We really need a stronger mentorship culture in general

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

ive seen developers complain about shitty prs before ai, ive seen devs literally not accept prs because they dont want to waste time understanding someone else's code. so no, this is a non issue.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't be quite so dismissive, this is a different scale than we've seen before, but I don't think it's the end of open contribution.

[–] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

ive also seen a lot of faster development or a lot of new software surface emerge thanks to this, while there is a downside, this also opens doors. i think this is a perfect scenario to use these massive tools created by capital to give something back to the people.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago

Okay but this is not replacing that, this is in addition to that.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Need some way to sort contributors by "trust", e.g. if their PRs have been accepted before, if their account has existed before GenAI was invented, etc

[–] Corngood@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It should be possible to use a distributed web of trust for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

[–] artyom@piefed.social 0 points 3 months ago

So no one new is allowed to contribute?