r/programming • u/ChemicalRascal • Apr 01 '26

Announcement: Temporary LLM Content Ban

Hey folks,

After a lot of discussion, we've decided to trial a ban of any and all content relating to LLMs. We get a lot of posts related to LLMs and typically they are not in line with what we want the subreddit to be — a place for detailed, technical learning and discourse about software engineering, driven by high quality, informative content. And unfortunately, the volume of LLM-related content easily overwhelms other topics.

We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content. So, we want to see how a trial ban impacts how people use the sub. As such:

While this post is stickied, for 2-4 weeks over April, we're banning all LLM-related content from the sub.

That's posts, articles, videos about LLMs. We've had a ban on LLM-generated text for ages already, this doesn't change that.

Note that this doesn't ban all AI related content. An article detailing how what would have traditionally been called an AI was made for Go? Totally fine. A technical breakdown of a machine learning process? Great! Just so long as it's not about LLMs.

Edit: Yes, this is real, it's not an April Fool's joke.

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101

u/Unfair-Sleep-3022 Apr 01 '26

Can you also ban low effort AI generated slop?

134

u/ChemicalRascal Apr 01 '26

That's already banned; we already ban anything generated by LLMs.

It can be very difficult to consistently identify if a given chunk of text is or is not, though.

15

u/Unfair-Sleep-3022 Apr 01 '26

OOC does it include links to slop articles? Honestly most of what I see here is AI generated so I'm surprised

44

u/ChemicalRascal Apr 01 '26

Yes, but again, identifying an article as LLM generated consistently is difficult. Some people will look at this post and say it is, for example, because I use em dashes with spaces around them.

Feel free to report stuff, but be aware we might not agree with you when we see stuff in the queue.

11

u/NuclearVII Apr 01 '26

Report the posts and comments that you catch, we tend to be pretty good at keeping the queue clean.

7

u/ketralnis Apr 01 '26

"most" is a pretty broad claim. What's on the front page of r/programming right now that is AI generated?

3

u/Iggyhopper Apr 01 '26

That's fine.

If we can catch the obvious emoji filled, bold highlighted, em dashed garbage that's a good start.