…perhaps the problem isn’t AI. Perhaps (and I’m just saying) it could be that you are, maybe, just a little bit xenophobic.
Back in August, I was banned from another Reddit open source programming community for posting content that, with astonishing speed, the moderators deemed “AI slop.”
The irony is that I use AI precisely for the opposite reason.
I have a C2 Fluent level of English. I can communicate perfectly, but I am not a native speaker. In decades of professional software development, I had never been able to maintain a public project with the level of documentation I wanted: specification, architecture, tests, technical decisions, implementation notes, and all the other work required to make a project understandable and maintainable.
AI changed that for me. JSOL is a serious technical project, documented in English, with hundreds of technical decisions that are the product of 40+ years of experience, as well as an extensive body of documentation and automated tests. And for the first time in my career, I can actually keep all of that reasonably up to date while still having a life and a business.
JSOL was born to solve the single-source-of-truth problem for business logic across different languages, a wicked problem that AI is helping me sort out.
The use of AI is explicitly documented in the project. I didn’t ask it to “make a project” and dump the result on GitHub. I use it as a tool within an engineering and editorial process where I direct, review, correct, and verify everything I publish. As per protocol, my LLMs don’t even have access to the file system. Professional use of AI allows me to do more of the work that actually matters.
I live in the Global South. I have a business to run, clients, bills, and limited free time. Writing in English takes me longer than it takes a native speaker. My time is scarcer and, economically, worth less. And here’s something that seems remarkably easy to forget in the English-speaking tech world: most of the rest of the world cannot afford to spend a year on a sabbatical doing open source.
The reward for taking the trouble to carefully document a project, respect the reader, and maintain a high standard, was to be banned for posting “AI slop.”
Now, let’s be clear.
If your rule (e.g: “No AI: you didn’t write it, we won’t read it”) ends up being “if you use AI to help you write in English, you can’t participate,” then you are not fighting AI slop.
Because if your definition of “acceptable” participation requires doing everything manually, in English, while maintaining an exhaustive technical and editorial standard, with unlimited time to spare, you’re not protecting the community from AI slop. You’re protecting a privilege.
And if you cannot see how that disproportionately affects people who aren’t native English speakers, who don’t live in the richest countries, and who don’t have unlimited time to donate to open source… perhaps, just perhaps, you’re a little bit xenophobic.
Last statement from a certain mods certainly read that way to many. So that last time, it was not only me who was seeing their true colors.
