Summary

  • 73% of Flathub apps labeled as “AI Slop” were abandoned within months.
  • Many were deleted or received no updates after release.
  • Analysis suggests the Flathub app AI ban helped spare reviewers and curb quick abandonware.
    • OwOarchist@pawb.social
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      6 hours ago

      Behold, the future of software development: disposable slop!

      Why maintain software for decades when you can just abandon it and make a completely new one 3 months later? Don’t need to maintain the code if you just throw it away and build a new one instead.

      And all it will cost is a massive amount of AI tokens and environmental damage.

      • naught101@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        At least it doesn’t come wrapped in plastic, though I guess big tech will figure out a way to do that too in the next few years

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 hours ago

        Hopefully we will see a lot less of it with the cost of AI going up. Eventually it will just be the big companies that can afford it.

        • naught101@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          That can afford it for now. Shit is gonna make their whole ecosystem a fragile jenga tower in no time, even the biggest ones.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          4 hours ago

          cost of AI going up

          The highly subsidized Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions will go away, but open weight models are getting much better over time - GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 are both very good.

          The most expensive part by far is training the model. That’s why OpenAI and Anthropic are losing so much money (well, that and the subscriptions).

          With an open weight model, someone has already trained it, and you just have to cover the cost of inference, making it a lot cheaper. Any company (or individual!) with powerful enough equipment can host the model, which means there’s competition in terms of price, compared to something like Claude Opus where the only four hosts (Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure AI Foundry) use Anthropic’s pricing.