The worst case is that someone loses out on $10, no? How does this work if the maintainer is the swindler?

I don't think that is a (very realistic) concern. AI is slop, the problem is not that the real contributors are struggling to get PRs merged.

The bigger issue being, raising the bar to students who may have otherwise had productive careers (but education is a general issue, where the students don't even yet recognize they are being scammed).

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rtdq 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't follow, and I'd be concerned that this opens up a cottage industry of bots generating plausible looking repositories that unwitting contributors would attempt to contribute to. We already know that bots are astroturfing repos to generate overinflated star counts. I'd say the least crap option here is to honeypot PR contributions from bots

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smaudet 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This feels like bot logic, lol.

Unless the contributors don't care about the repos they contribute to, this is not a likely scenario. AI doesn't care. We do.

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rtdq 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What is bot logic exactly?

You keep describing this as not a likely or realistic scenario. But why is the likelihood even of relevance here? The way to avoid the worst case i.e scammed of your money, is to not even put it on the table in the first place.

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smaudet 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> What is bot logic exactly?

Ill thought out logic like your own. I think you are likely a bot at this point.

It's not likely, because that's not something that people are likely to do. Only a bot like yourself with a poor model of the world will do this type of thing. It will be amusing to see the AI bots trying to run the scam you are describing and then nobody will contribute to the fake projects... except other fake AI contributors.

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rtdq 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Dude, you're claiming that there's no likelihood of people getting swindled out of their money by handing it over to strangers. So your reaction is to play the bot card? We're done. You're clearly not arguing in good faith here.

	▲	rglullis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> people getting swindled out of their money by handing it over to strangers. I think that OP is trying to say is that there is very little reason for a human to go through the trouble of contributing to a "plausible looking fake repo". To get to the point that a repo starts to attract interest from other contributors, that project needs to have actual utility. Who in their right mind would jump into opening a PR from projects they never used? And if the project does get used to the point that it attracts people interested in contribute to improve it, wouldn't it mean that we've achieved https://xkcd.com/810 ?