Please reconsider use of LLMs

OGS Development
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Hi all,

I’ve been playing here pretty much daily for 8 years, and supporting the project financially for 3 years. I expected to play in the Through The Years tournament for many more years.

But today I discovered that you’ve been using LLMs to produce the site’s code for the last year. I’m mostly just confused about why this would seem like a good idea, given the ethical, legal and social problems with using commercial LLMs.

I wouldn’t willingly give money to LLM companies or to projects that embrace them. Not taking a principled stand against LLMs always seems to go hand-in-hand with a community deteriorating horribly.

I didn’t realise I’ve been unwittingly funding LLM companies. I thought OGS was just for fun, for people to play go together. Honestly I feel betrayed, sad, and mostly just loss for what I thought was something nice.

Is there any chance you’ll reconsider using LLMs, and make OGS by and for people instead?

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Could you give us more details about LLM used in OGS?

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LLMs in software development are not going away anymore, they drastically improve productivity. I get where you are coming from, but I think software that is not developed using LLMs will be very rare in a few years.

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Anti-AI is the new vegan.

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For many reasons I am bummed about LLMs too (not here specifically, but in the world), but there is no doubt they are useful for certain tasks.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect OGS to avoid such tools when almost every other software project is benefiting from them.

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As far as I know most of our “main” code is supplied by (mostly two) humans.

There is a bunch of LLM checks that are now basically part of GitHub (and honestly useful AFAI am concerned). Are there any specific concerns you would like to discuss @Grey_the_earthling?

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How do you figure?

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Commits · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub shows about ~half the commits these days either having Claude or “ogsai” as a git co-committer, goban is similar.

(I’m intentionally not stating an opinion, just think it’s useful to ground things in actual commit history instead of vibes for the parts that are OSS)

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I haven’t met a programmer that doesn’t feel this conflict at a personal level. In the past few years a large swath of what made me stand apart from my peers has eroded and given way to coding agents.

I could write an essay about my own internal conflicts on the topic, but instead of that let me summarize that I have personally reconciled to shun AI for creative use but embrace it for rote use. Take away the drudgery, but don’t let it control direction. Don’t let it imagine for you.

Anyways, I would like to comment on this closing part of your note:

Since the advent of LLMs the project has been getting an increased number of code contributions by non programmers. These days I can’t recall the last one I got that was written by a human, but plenty were directed by non programmers.

So I ask you this, is disallowing those contributions by and for the people? Excluding those contributions because they aren’t experienced programmers is disenfranchising a huge portion of Go players.

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Sounds like the perfect balance.

Tools of any kind are ethically neutral. With a hammer in hand one can build - or kill.

And so, as with any power tool, AI will be used for both good and for evil. It remains up to humanity as to how we deal with such realities.

Refusing to use a power tool for any purpose is rarely the best approach. :vulcan_salute:

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Mh… I don’t know where you stand in this, but I for one am vegan, for moral/ethical/conscience reasons … I reached here after decades of being into “animal cognition”, and after learning that the other animals are actually “nonhuman persons”, that they feel pain, that they have emotions, that they have friends, that fish feel pain and that they love their children (yes, there are exceptions in the animal kingdom, with cannibalism, etc., but that doesn’t make my statements generally wrong).

About AI – I for one am not GENERALLY against AI. I am against indiscriminate use of AI, I am against using AI to exploit humans (scraping of art, music, texts, esp. when without permission), I am against destruction of the environment (CO₂ and water footprint, etc.), I am against cheating with AI, etc.

So, for me, there’s quite a difference between veganism and being against AI, inasmuch as I am quite generally pro-vegan, and I anti-AI in specific cases, which, however, cover most of the current use of AI.

Good uses of AI can, IMO, be in medicine, probably even more generally in sciences, in Go (of course), etc.

<edit>
I can totally agree with this:

</edit>

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Is a hammer made out of the bones of murdered babies ethically neutral? To dismiss OP’s concerns as such is missing the point that there are ethical considerations in the creation of LLMs as a tool before you even use them.

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This anti-LLM crusade seems like a bad take honestly. For the same reasons as those who crusade against AI-generated thumbnails on youtube. People like OP conflate the tool with the intent behind using it (i.e. malevolence, unethical, etc..) It’s just something people complain about online because it’s trendy and generates the same dopamine feedback as doom-scrolling on instagram. Why not OP start his own go server so that OP may be run it however he or she sees fit?

Reminds me of a famous quote: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better…”

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:roll_eyes::person_shrugging:

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I don’t like vibe coders and will always try to stay away from things they make. BUT,
If an experienced programmer is using it, I have no issues with it.

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I think the point that was made was about the “I don’t like this, therefore OTHER people should stop doing that” attitude.

While vegans and vegeterians have a practical difference in what they eat, the terms have come to have an extra meaning online were “vegeterian” is more or less what you described yourself as (a normal person that has personal dietary preferences for very specific reasons), while a “vegan” is a person that has gone beyond “vegeterianism” for their own selves and are actively pushing/pressuring other people into their own mindset, to the point of being annoying/pushy, like a pamphlet-quoting preacher knocking on your door on Sunday morning.

So, while vegeterians are respected, vegans on the other hand have reached the high heavens of “meme land” so there is a phrase like “these people are the vegans of matterX”, like “the Stop Oil activists are the vegans of enviromentalists”. :roll_eyes:

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To the “tools are neutral” arguments:

OP specifically mentioned commercial LLM’s, so not all LLM’s. Their concern likely doesn’t lie with the tool itself, but with the behavior of the companies that make them and the governments that let them.

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I dont know if youre aware of this distinction, but the technical distinction is that vegetarians still consume animal products like eggs and milk, whereas vegans do not. Trohde has described himself as vegan. It’s not an attitude thing.

EDIT: I reread your post and realized youre aware of the distinction, but that youve seen it used differently online. I havent.

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yeah, in my locality, the literal vegans are called vegetarians. so my first encounter to vegans was online through those memes. and I was like, hmmmmmm… looks like some cultist. it was years later when I found out what actual vegans are.

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From a non-developer perspective makes sense, but It’s easy as this. I’m professional developer since 20 years ago, and I love to sit and just develop and write code. But since the arrival of the LLMs era, all changed and this is no productive anymore. Right now, I’m more productive than before, and if I refuse to use LLM on my work, I’ll be fired.

Throw your hate against those not-developers who vibe-code everything without development knowledge. BTW, AI will not go away. Today, you have to embrace AI, or be left behind in exile.

Edited: Using AI doesn’t exempt you from needing to know how to use it, understand business logic, and be technically specific about what it needs to do. It’s not as simple as pressing a button and getting the job done.

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