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Lutris maintainer use AI generated code for some time now. The maintainer also removed the co-authorship of Claude, so no one knows which code was generated by AI.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
He might have had a leg to stand on here if this was an AI that he had trained himself on ethically-sourced data, but personally I don't want to be lectured by anyone about "our current capitalist culture" who is intentionally playing right into it by financially supporting the companies at the center of the AI bubble. The very corporations that are known to have scraped countless terabytes of unlicensed data for their own for-profit exploitation, by the way.
If you discard your self-proclaimed values the second that it becomes convenient or "valuable", you never had any values to begin with.
Practice what you preach, or don't preach at all.
intellectual property is part of the capitalist culture FYI
As is FOSS licensed software... Copyright and license notices at the top of every source file.
So, why should anyone respect the GPL or even the MIT license when they can simply ignore it and exploit the work of the open source community?
I don’t think they should? IP stifles innovation and artistic expression.
Well, then I guess you're not such a fan of "open source" as the developer of Lutris is, because he has chosen to maintain the copyright of his work and license his code under the GPLv3.
As a believer in FOSS myself, I think it's hypocritical that he expects people to respect the license attached to his code when he is choosing not to respect the licenses of others.
Ethically sourced data is a hilarious phrase.
Why? You really don't see any difference between training an AI model off of public domain, creative commons and licensed data, and corporations like Meta and Anthropic pirating millions of books without even so much as consent from the original authors?
I wouldn't have a problem with AI if it was trained legitimately, but sadly working people are being ripped off by massive corporations on an unprecedented scale.
If you truly believe AI is so great, own it. Trying to hide it is not a good look. It shows that they know it's something to be ashamed of.
Beyond that, I actually consider this to be a violation of open source, if not in letter, at least in spirit. Setting aside the debate about inclusion of LLM-generated code in open source software, I see the obfuscation of the source of that code to be robbing me of my fundamental freedom to truly study the code. It also robs me of my choice to decide where and when I interact with AI in my life.
Going further, I would love to see FSOSS projects adopt the idea that its not enough to cite what code is LLM-generated, but that citations should include the tool used, the model, and the prompt as well.
Unfortunately, this move by Lutris forces me to assume all code in Lutris is vibe-coded from this point forward, and that Lutris itself is no longer open source software.
They know people spit slop slop slop slop like a thirsty dog. Every public defense is protesting too much, every quiet effort is conscience of guilt. The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
We each need private vigilance against participating in public harassment campaigns. Is there any reason these people's behavior changed, or that they were keeping things quiet, besides the fear of dealing with you?
A number of weeks ago I noted that one app I use through Lutris for the various settings needed had stopped loading. So I did a lot of looking around to figure out what was going on (didn't know it was Lutris, I searched mention of issues with the app, with Wine, etc.)
Finally ran across a bug report in the Lutris github that sounded like my problem. And part of it was how slow some updates filter out, so I ended up doing an uninstall from the manager and manually forcing an update. And all is good now.
I wonder if the bug was AI driven (don't even recall what it was, it was a small update that broke things for some people).
Great to know I should probably expect more fires later. I probably need to see if I can make this app run on my own in Wine. A shame, it's working fine as is. But I need to be ready.
As much as I don't like AI I don't blame him for using it. Opensource is a thankless sector where maintainers put in massive amount of work for nothing in return. If AI is helping him then all the power to him.
That being said we don't know how AI code generated currently will age. We know how the code 3 years ago ended up being slop of hard to maintain code but modern models are a lot more competent. Maybe he shouldn't have removed the coauthored by Claude thingy but in the end it's him using a tool and verifying it's output.
I used lutris back in the day for playing rocket league and I'd also use it today. I feel we should give this guy the benefit of the doubt for now. If in the future Lutris becomes less stable we should absolutely blame AI but until then I'll hold off on my judgement.
It's slop now despite using AI code for some time?
It has been slop for a while.
Just took a while to realise.
Well, guess I'm uninstalling Lutris now. I'll have to manage my library the old fashioned way until a slop-free alternative comes along.
I was thinking about it - its a massive project. It does a lot of stuff that I've never touched, for me personally - all I do is use it to manage my wine prefixes. Obviously there is a lot of extra stuff that goes into it, but I could probably write my own app that does that much at least in a couple weeks.
I guess this is all to say, its a huge project and for me personally it has a lot of what you might call bloat. Maybe something that pairs all that extra stuff away into optional plugins might be a better approach for a next generation all-in-one launcher
You might want to consider Bottles as an alternative for managing Wine prefixes and launching applications.
Interesting that the maintainer of Proton-GE personally closed the first issue. Keep an eye on Proton-GE's quality over the next few months.
welp, another project off my list.
It was handy as in it enabled me to not require opening EGS, but I haven't been using EGS lately anyway.
It's easier to just stop using it rather than have to write a Firejail profile for it.
Could someone branch the project off from a point in time when it was safely human-coded and develop from there?
Any viable alternatives to Lutris? Please don’t say Heroic Launcher.
What kind of alternative are you searching for? What feature set do you want?
There are a few things like Bottles, Heroic, gamehub, playonlinux, etc...
I think bottles is the best recommendation. Gamehub isnt being developed anymore as far as i can tell and playonlinux was last updated 6 years ago.
Something that works as well as Lutris does on the Steam Deck in terms of ease of use and being able to get all my old windows games working with minimal effort.
I've been using Faugus and so far never had an issue.
