As a lot of us know, AI has become a increasingly bigger problem on Dev.to. Whether it's spam or listicles, we've all likely seen AI generated content in one form or the other. Some of the more active Dev.to moderators, myself included, have discussed this and see it as an important issue, but because a lot of that discussion takes place behind closed doors (in other words, the Dev.to moderator discord), I wanted to compile a short post of thoughts and ideas that brings a bit of transparency to the ongoing conversation about AI generated content.

Complaints about AI generated content

It feels like so many of the posts are clout-chasing LLM-generated crap.

-An anonymous moderator

It's not exactly DEV's fault, the internet is mostly AI-generated content and listicles these days.

-An anonymous moderator

I used to read some good stuff and it’s been non stop LLM pushing and listicle style for a while. I admittedly have stopped marking low quality and have abandoned even attempting to read Dev for the past couple months.

-An anonymous moderator

As for my own thoughts, AI has helped low quality content become much more popular. Low quality content used to be pretty easy to spot, but it's harder to filter through low quality content now because 90% of is AI generated.

So what should we do?

That last part was a little bit nihilistic, so I'd like to bring some ideas about how to deal with AI generated content from our moderators to the table. I'd also like to hear from you guys (the comments, that is), so if you have any ideas please feel free to comment them!

... maybe an automatic quality checker would be nice on DEV, like an API that after posting an article checks for the chances of it being AI-generated ...

-An anonymous moderator

... (how about we) force new accounts to wait a {periodOfTime} before they can post content on Dev. This eliminates a large chunk of the regurgitated AI post and run for clicks.

-An anonymous moderator

Have we considered having a "listicle" type, and then letting folks filter those out?

-An anonymous moderator

I think that there are two stages to this idea: suppress publishing of bad written / poor AI content; encourage people to get back to read good content on DEV; ..." Side note: "this idea" pertains to the idea of an automatic quality checker and the potential side effects of it.

-An anonymous moderator

I'd like to acknowledge one potential issue: false positives with AI detectors. This could certainly be an issue, but the amount of false positives would adamantly be negligible. Additionally, these false positives could simply be appealed, and a human could look over the post to clarify that it isn't AI generated.

To conclude...

What do you think about these ideas? As I previously mentioned, if you have any yourself, please feel free to say something. AI generated content is a community-wide issue, and it should be handled as such.

A side note for the people that I've quoted: If you would like to be credited (i.e. your username instead of "An anonymous moderator"), just let me know. I figured it would be better to air on the safe side and not involve anyone who didn't want to be involved.