What are the rules? Is it okay to use autocomplete? Are spell checkers accepted? What if I used an AI chatbot to figure out something instead of a traditional search engine?
None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)
The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
The site only states "There's only one rule: generative AI cannot be used in the creation of the project.", without defining any further rules, nor does it clarify the exact definition of "creation of the project".
Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
> The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.
"You must nail down every single detail in objective terms" is a dishonest requirement we, as engineers, reach for when we don't like something subjectively. It's petty. It's not honest.
If you're an engineer, you'll understand why it's not petty. You do not want ambiguity in engineering. If you cannot even define what it is that you're campaigning for, then it's just random ramblings with no substance. No one's going to take you seriously if you can't even define what you're asking of others.
> Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
Any dependency on a vibe-coded library, however indirect, makes an application not 100% human made (since the application relies on the library for some of its featutes).
If that's going to be your definition, then it's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible to have a 100% human made program, unless you've personally hand-coded the entire OS, or you've verified beyond doubt that no vibe-coded dependency exist in the entire dependency chain - both build and runtime, direct and indirect.
I'm not sure how feasible verification of that would be, unless we have some "certified 100% human" certification program of some sort, with an external auditing agency or something - because you can't trust humans, they will 100% lie.
If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
Even if you actually consider the OS a dependency, which is a stretch
And hopefully vibe coding doesn't get as widespread to become hard to avoid it.
> If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users.
> You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code, and you can bet your arse that Google and Apple are too. So that just leaves the niche OSes, and although I don't know of their individual stances, the trust problem still remains - how do you know they're not using gen-AI in some shape or form, without some sort of formal certification and auditing system?
> That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users
I wouldn't really say that
> That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code
If it's accurately reviewed it's fine for me, although yeah, it wouldn't fit the 100% human definition.
Just as you can make GPL software for closed-source operating systems, though, I think you could ignore the OS in a definition of 100% human-made software.
This is dishonest (and very common). You may certainly argue that genAI content should count as human-made, but it's pointless to just gesture at pre-genAI tools like autocomplete and insist that other people do the work of comparing/contrasting.
It's OK to use the term "human made" to mean "not the output of genAI". There's no "gotcha" to be scored here.
i think you need to be more specific: if just the procedural generation was replaced or augmented with AI generation, would that be less acceptable? the procedural part is machine generated either way and everything else is done by hand as before.
the question here really depends on how much the procedural generator is an artwork in itself, and how much that would be lessened by using AI to generate the worlds instead.
This is a horrible take if for no other reason that digital intelligence is one of humanity's greatest achievements. It took thousands of years of advancements across chemistry, physics, material science to reach the point in the tech tree we are today.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
There is nothing wrong with walking or riding horses to get to where you need to go but I wouldn't celebrate that. It's a nice hobby bit not efficient. The same will probably happen to most of "human made code". It's fun but doesn't make much sense economically.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
In many cases, there are clear disadvantages to using AI, be it the effect on human psyche, the considerable resource consumption, the style of the output, or the fact that the resulting work was not authored by a person, which is a very subjective preference, but one that many people have nevertheless.
I agree that AI is a great technological achievement, but it’s not as if great technological achievements don’t come with any downsides. Celebrating them is reasonable, but also situational.
Horrible? You could have argued that celebrating both things is fine. But you didn't. The implication is simply the opposite: That I should be ashamed if I enjoy or am proud to have made something by hand.
Technology is not a universal good. That's a simplistic idea.
We have taken thousands of years to develop all sorts of horrible shit with more downsides than upsides - things that only exist because they are inevitable, not because they are purely beneficial to the spirit or even the practical wellbeing of humanity.
Take a example. You could be a hunter gatherer, you could grow all your own crops from scratch, you could forsake all modern medicine and rely on superstition - would you be considered a wise person? You figured out things a lot of people didn't, you took the harder road - but most people would say this approach is just dumb.
What's wise isn't forsaking technology, it's using technology to improve things, and developing new technology as well. What's wise is using AI as a power user and seeing how you can contribute to the intelligence age.
Celebrating a foregone past where human intelligence was more valuable is hopeless and naive at best.
That's not an example, it's an analogy. I don't see the value in shifting the conversation to identifying all the differences in an (extremely removed) analogy. It's rhetorically low-quality.
Different people value different things. Some people run even though they could have taken a Waymo. Some people are into paperclipmaxxing. I avoid AI to the extent that it's easy and practical, but I don't do it to call myself wise. I just don't like it. Am I being inefficient? Possibly. There are some things I do where I'm not optimizing for KPI though.
Do you think it would be a good thing if all music (for example) was made with AI and not by humans? What a lot of people in tech right now don’t seem to get is that art is about how it transforms the artist, not just the final product.
How is digital intelligence different from every technology that has ever and will ever exist, in your comment? Why does your comment apply to it, and not to other things (nukes, bioweapons, slot machines)? Is every technology inherently worth celebrating?
Your comment begs the question. It's worth celebrating because it's a great achievement because you said so.
As a person who likes hand made items I'm for this. I will pay a premium for someone who hand makes an item. Bonus if it's someone older who provides old school craftsmanship.
If the only interesting thing about a work is it's provenance is that work actually valuable?
actually in all honesty human works are predominantly crap, and a bit passé. If I'm going to visit a site whose whole shtick is provenance I'd rather see some really, objectively good, ai stuff. that would be way more interesting.
This was my earliest use-case for LLMs and it remains to this day as the most compelling value proposition of all the fancy new LLMs.
I have always tried to abide by DRY in my programming career with the huge exception of writing unit tests. I made the mistake, early in my career when Test-Driven Development was all the rage, of making unit tests reflect the inheritance structure of the actual code. It just made sense. Needless to say, it quickly descended into the most bizarre manifestation of inheritance hell as tests randomly failed with no correlation to the changes done in the core code.
Hence, I resolved to make unit tests the huge exception to DRY. The more straightforward your tests are, the better. Endeavor that each test method up to a test class should read understandably on its own.
This, of course, made tests quite a mechanical chore to write. Which makes it the perfect use case for these large, verbose, and humorless daemons. Bonus that they are also very good at vibing out the set-up needed for a test so I can focus on specifying the test cases I want rather than setting up mock after stub after fake.
The output is also very easy to review and verify. I see no moral quandary in this kind of usage.
I'm not entirely sure what "100% human-made" even means. Also, what is the difference between 90% and 100%? Is any website (of the modern era) 100% human made?
Lucky for you, the website answers these questions in the very few sentences of text that it contains, so you can just read those sentences if you actually want your questions answered.
I find it interesting how the techies are suddenly losing their minds over technology. We have killed a ton of other people’s jobs over the last few decades and made excellent money doing so. Now it seems it’s our turn
Good. I wish we would kill 100% of the "jobs" out there and we could all start working on the things that we want instead of spending the best years of our lives doing stupid bullshit.
We should work to eliminate all work. That should be something we strive towards. The end of work you don't want to do.
When I use AI to produce a work, it’s human-made, just the same as when I use a computer to synthesize digital works using human-developed automation tools like word processors. All built on top of operating systems that manipulate bytes of all natural human-made data.
From the name I was expecting to be humans doing things to force work. Like my child pouring milk on the table. Now I get to do work cleaning. It's human-made work. It's pretty easy to make work for others.
When slop-jockeys get so triggered they pretend they can't even comprehend the premise and start to hyperfixate on semantics and pedantism you know it's a good idea.
Work generated by AI is extremely mediocre, and the entire cult of enthusiasm around it is forced. The GenAI cult can kindly fuck off to their AI waifus and leave those of us who still find value in being human alone.
I don't understand what "human-made" means. Are they going to write assembly code themselves or are they taking a big pile of sand to create some transistors?
I understand some of the concerns about AI but they are either a problem of our economic system or of people not caring about what they are doing. Economic problems are probably the most important because robotics and AI have the potential to break our current capitalist system.
Time and time again I see these people spazzing out about human made work, as though humans should have to do any work at all that they don't freely choose to! Like, there's some moral puritan value to toiling in the code mines until you wither and die.
We're finally approaching a world where humans could work less and the only thought people can think about is how jobs might go away or some other such bullshit. Capitalist Realism has gotten so bad that I've seen anarchists cheering on copyright law and "so called" leftists wishing for the halcyon days of 30 years ago - just like their parents did in the 90s.
It's wild how conservative of an era we're in right now.
This is a really good idea. I have zero interest in seeing something that someone couldn't be bothered to actually make themselves. And while we can't control the fact that people choose to outsource their creativity and thinking to a machine, we can choose to celebrate and highlight those who do not. I hope we see more of this as genAI becomes more and more of a blight on the quality of work out there.
I don't mean to piss on your parade but llm generation is human output just like a car welded by robots is a human product. This contrived dualism between llm generated things and human generated things makes the llm into an independent agent (it is not, it is a statistical approximator) and denies the human origin of automated creations. do we say numbers calculated by hand are less authentic than by boolean logic? do we say books printed by press are less human in origin than medieval calligraphy? Ai is a tool. Its output is the result of human intention / attention.
When people say "hand-made furniture", everyone knows what that means. No one is struggling with the definition of "human-made work" except those who seem offended by its existence.
What are the rules? Is it okay to use autocomplete? Are spell checkers accepted? What if I used an AI chatbot to figure out something instead of a traditional search engine?
Is it ok if I used a compiler and didn't write the assembly code by hand?
It's hard to tell if you're mocking the parent's fallacy or contributing to it.
I suppose the argument being made is more about the meaning of human made rather than GenAI.
You're implying compilers now utilize generative AI somehow? I doubt that very much.
Nope. You also can't use a CPU made by big ASML machines. If you decide to go with a mechanical computer I am not sure if a lathe is ok.
You start from a rock and build your own CPU.
None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)
The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
The site only states "There's only one rule: generative AI cannot be used in the creation of the project.", without defining any further rules, nor does it clarify the exact definition of "creation of the project".
Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
> The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.
"You must nail down every single detail in objective terms" is a dishonest requirement we, as engineers, reach for when we don't like something subjectively. It's petty. It's not honest.
If you're an engineer, you'll understand why it's not petty. You do not want ambiguity in engineering. If you cannot even define what it is that you're campaigning for, then it's just random ramblings with no substance. No one's going to take you seriously if you can't even define what you're asking of others.
> Like, what if you included a library in your project that was vibe-coded (but your main code wasn't), would your project be considered as "human-made"?
Of course not.
What if the library was human-made, but that library included a library that was vibe-coded?
If that's not okay, what if the library included a library which included a library that was vibe-coded?
I think you know the answer :rolleyes:
Hopefully things are not so bad yet that it's an unlikely situation
I don't know the answer, so please do enlighten.
Any dependency on a vibe-coded library, however indirect, makes an application not 100% human made (since the application relies on the library for some of its featutes).
If that's going to be your definition, then it's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible to have a 100% human made program, unless you've personally hand-coded the entire OS, or you've verified beyond doubt that no vibe-coded dependency exist in the entire dependency chain - both build and runtime, direct and indirect.
I'm not sure how feasible verification of that would be, unless we have some "certified 100% human" certification program of some sort, with an external auditing agency or something - because you can't trust humans, they will 100% lie.
If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
Even if you actually consider the OS a dependency, which is a stretch
And hopefully vibe coding doesn't get as widespread to become hard to avoid it.
> If "verifying the entire dependency chain" is that difficult for your project, you have a problem in any case (and you're probably using npm).
That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users.
> You don't need to have personally hand-coded the OS, of course, you just need a OS that's not vibe-coded, and hopefully that just means avoiding Windows.
That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code, and you can bet your arse that Google and Apple are too. So that just leaves the niche OSes, and although I don't know of their individual stances, the trust problem still remains - how do you know they're not using gen-AI in some shape or form, without some sort of formal certification and auditing system?
> That's a problem for anyone coding a modern app these days, not just npm users
I wouldn't really say that
> That's a problem too, because Linux is already accepting gen-AI code
If it's accurately reviewed it's fine for me, although yeah, it wouldn't fit the 100% human definition.
Just as you can make GPL software for closed-source operating systems, though, I think you could ignore the OS in a definition of 100% human-made software.
This is dishonest (and very common). You may certainly argue that genAI content should count as human-made, but it's pointless to just gesture at pre-genAI tools like autocomplete and insist that other people do the work of comparing/contrasting.
It's OK to use the term "human made" to mean "not the output of genAI". There's no "gotcha" to be scored here.
Ok, what about a more direct take.
Hello games made a game called No Man's Sky which has VERY heavy use of procedural generation. Same as Minecraft.
If someone were to make the same games using genAi, would it be less impressive, even if the output was 'better'?
i think you need to be more specific: if just the procedural generation was replaced or augmented with AI generation, would that be less acceptable? the procedural part is machine generated either way and everything else is done by hand as before.
the question here really depends on how much the procedural generator is an artwork in itself, and how much that would be lessened by using AI to generate the worlds instead.
Yes, of course.
But even if the answer was no, I don't see the relationship to what I said. I never commented on "impressiveness".
Yes.
yeah?
What is dishonest about asking for clarification of submission criteria that are utterly unclear?
> Help us to signify and share projects done by humans (not AI).
Here is nothing about GenAI specifically.
Who else could be asked if not the ones that set up this collection?
I dunno what version of the site you saw, but it probably hasn't changed in the last 17 minutes since your post.
I made some rules: https://lee-phillips.org/humanmade/
I think I draw the line at a place that makes sense. (And mine was first, but I don’t care, as long as the movement takes off.)
what are the rules for hand-made? is it okay to use blades? are tables accepted? what if i used a digitized text to learn my craft
come on
This is a horrible take if for no other reason that digital intelligence is one of humanity's greatest achievements. It took thousands of years of advancements across chemistry, physics, material science to reach the point in the tech tree we are today.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
Ok, but there's also nothing wrong with celebrating not using AI.
There is nothing wrong with walking or riding horses to get to where you need to go but I wouldn't celebrate that. It's a nice hobby bit not efficient. The same will probably happen to most of "human made code". It's fun but doesn't make much sense economically.
We must only celebrate that which is economically efficient.
This is horrifying.
> It took thousands of years of advancements across chemistry, physics, material science to reach the point in the tech tree we are today.
so did everything, these words don't actually mean anything
Pesticides represent a great achievement. People still pay more for organic though.
this seems like a terrible example. wish i could avoid "organic" products like i do "AI-first" products
You can! At pretty much every grocery store, you can get non-organic products.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
In many cases, there are clear disadvantages to using AI, be it the effect on human psyche, the considerable resource consumption, the style of the output, or the fact that the resulting work was not authored by a person, which is a very subjective preference, but one that many people have nevertheless.
I agree that AI is a great technological achievement, but it’s not as if great technological achievements don’t come with any downsides. Celebrating them is reasonable, but also situational.
The printing invention didn't change the fact that we are still today celebrating painters.
Horrible? You could have argued that celebrating both things is fine. But you didn't. The implication is simply the opposite: That I should be ashamed if I enjoy or am proud to have made something by hand.
Technology is not a universal good. That's a simplistic idea. We have taken thousands of years to develop all sorts of horrible shit with more downsides than upsides - things that only exist because they are inevitable, not because they are purely beneficial to the spirit or even the practical wellbeing of humanity.
Take a example. You could be a hunter gatherer, you could grow all your own crops from scratch, you could forsake all modern medicine and rely on superstition - would you be considered a wise person? You figured out things a lot of people didn't, you took the harder road - but most people would say this approach is just dumb.
What's wise isn't forsaking technology, it's using technology to improve things, and developing new technology as well. What's wise is using AI as a power user and seeing how you can contribute to the intelligence age.
Celebrating a foregone past where human intelligence was more valuable is hopeless and naive at best.
That's not an example, it's an analogy. I don't see the value in shifting the conversation to identifying all the differences in an (extremely removed) analogy. It's rhetorically low-quality.
Different people value different things. Some people run even though they could have taken a Waymo. Some people are into paperclipmaxxing. I avoid AI to the extent that it's easy and practical, but I don't do it to call myself wise. I just don't like it. Am I being inefficient? Possibly. There are some things I do where I'm not optimizing for KPI though.
Do you think it would be a good thing if all music (for example) was made with AI and not by humans? What a lot of people in tech right now don’t seem to get is that art is about how it transforms the artist, not just the final product.
How is digital intelligence different from every technology that has ever and will ever exist, in your comment? Why does your comment apply to it, and not to other things (nukes, bioweapons, slot machines)? Is every technology inherently worth celebrating?
Your comment begs the question. It's worth celebrating because it's a great achievement because you said so.
You're absolutely right!
As a person who likes hand made items I'm for this. I will pay a premium for someone who hand makes an item. Bonus if it's someone older who provides old school craftsmanship.
If the only interesting thing about a work is it's provenance is that work actually valuable?
actually in all honesty human works are predominantly crap, and a bit passé. If I'm going to visit a site whose whole shtick is provenance I'd rather see some really, objectively good, ai stuff. that would be way more interesting.
I have began to use AI to flesh out unittests and honestly am kind of digging that part. All the actual code is still me though.
This was my earliest use-case for LLMs and it remains to this day as the most compelling value proposition of all the fancy new LLMs.
I have always tried to abide by DRY in my programming career with the huge exception of writing unit tests. I made the mistake, early in my career when Test-Driven Development was all the rage, of making unit tests reflect the inheritance structure of the actual code. It just made sense. Needless to say, it quickly descended into the most bizarre manifestation of inheritance hell as tests randomly failed with no correlation to the changes done in the core code.
Hence, I resolved to make unit tests the huge exception to DRY. The more straightforward your tests are, the better. Endeavor that each test method up to a test class should read understandably on its own.
This, of course, made tests quite a mechanical chore to write. Which makes it the perfect use case for these large, verbose, and humorless daemons. Bonus that they are also very good at vibing out the set-up needed for a test so I can focus on specifying the test cases I want rather than setting up mock after stub after fake.
The output is also very easy to review and verify. I see no moral quandary in this kind of usage.
I'm not entirely sure what "100% human-made" even means. Also, what is the difference between 90% and 100%? Is any website (of the modern era) 100% human made?
Lucky for you, the website answers these questions in the very few sentences of text that it contains, so you can just read those sentences if you actually want your questions answered.
I find it interesting how the techies are suddenly losing their minds over technology. We have killed a ton of other people’s jobs over the last few decades and made excellent money doing so. Now it seems it’s our turn
An immoral fallacy. People will fight for, subjectively, their values; and objectively, their livelihoods.
They'll do this no matter how bad you try to make them feel. In fact, belittling them tends to have the opposite effect.
<troy-barnes-good.gif>
Good. I wish we would kill 100% of the "jobs" out there and we could all start working on the things that we want instead of spending the best years of our lives doing stupid bullshit.
We should work to eliminate all work. That should be something we strive towards. The end of work you don't want to do.
I don't think it's possible to infer your definition of "work" from what you wrote.
If you are doing something, that's work. You are against doing things you don't like. That's a different topic.
[dead]
When I use AI to produce a work, it’s human-made, just the same as when I use a computer to synthesize digital works using human-developed automation tools like word processors. All built on top of operating systems that manipulate bytes of all natural human-made data.
says the guy making a sloperating system lmao
From the name I was expecting to be humans doing things to force work. Like my child pouring milk on the table. Now I get to do work cleaning. It's human-made work. It's pretty easy to make work for others.
"Work" as in artwork or "Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"
I like this project and the negative responses here are reinforcing me in this decision.
When slop-jockeys get so triggered they pretend they can't even comprehend the premise and start to hyperfixate on semantics and pedantism you know it's a good idea.
the work featured is extremely mediocre and the "human made" label feels forced
Work generated by AI is extremely mediocre, and the entire cult of enthusiasm around it is forced. The GenAI cult can kindly fuck off to their AI waifus and leave those of us who still find value in being human alone.
Its ironic that the 2 apps being showcased are a sobriety tracking app and a brewery brand.
In what way is this ironic?
I don't understand what "human-made" means. Are they going to write assembly code themselves or are they taking a big pile of sand to create some transistors?
I understand some of the concerns about AI but they are either a problem of our economic system or of people not caring about what they are doing. Economic problems are probably the most important because robotics and AI have the potential to break our current capitalist system.
Time and time again I see these people spazzing out about human made work, as though humans should have to do any work at all that they don't freely choose to! Like, there's some moral puritan value to toiling in the code mines until you wither and die.
We're finally approaching a world where humans could work less and the only thought people can think about is how jobs might go away or some other such bullshit. Capitalist Realism has gotten so bad that I've seen anarchists cheering on copyright law and "so called" leftists wishing for the halcyon days of 30 years ago - just like their parents did in the 90s.
It's wild how conservative of an era we're in right now.
This is a really good idea. I have zero interest in seeing something that someone couldn't be bothered to actually make themselves. And while we can't control the fact that people choose to outsource their creativity and thinking to a machine, we can choose to celebrate and highlight those who do not. I hope we see more of this as genAI becomes more and more of a blight on the quality of work out there.
I don't mean to piss on your parade but llm generation is human output just like a car welded by robots is a human product. This contrived dualism between llm generated things and human generated things makes the llm into an independent agent (it is not, it is a statistical approximator) and denies the human origin of automated creations. do we say numbers calculated by hand are less authentic than by boolean logic? do we say books printed by press are less human in origin than medieval calligraphy? Ai is a tool. Its output is the result of human intention / attention.
When people say "hand-made furniture", everyone knows what that means. No one is struggling with the definition of "human-made work" except those who seem offended by its existence.
My thoughts are, apparently, a threat to OpenAI's valuation. lol.
[dead]
Reminds of Books By People https://booksbypeople.org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45713367)
The comments on this are so utterly depressing