I imagine the intent is “code maintainability doesn’t matter, because IF works usually aren’t maintained for very long after release”. But I disagree there too, because the LLM-generated code is filled with bugs, which matter in any sort of programming—and maintainability is what lets you find and fix those bugs.
That aside…
I came into this thread as a skeptic; a single-digit percentage of LLM-generated entries didn’t seem like a crisis worth litigating in the middle of the competition. Surely it could just wait for the feedback survey, and if it became a problem, it could be changed next year?
But the more I’m hearing from the pro-LLM crowd, the more I agree that it should be banned.
The most compelling argument I’ve heard for banning LLM-generated works from community events—since, after all, the ethical and environmental issues could theoretically be improved—is that people enjoy generating them but don’t enjoy playing them. The slop takes barely seconds to shovel out, but much longer than that to wade through. And this thread is only reinforcing that argument. The pro-LLM side is posting code samples that they clearly haven’t even read, asking us to find any issues in them, then when we put in the work to respond in good faith, they shrug and say they can always generate more slop later.
Stack Exchange (the community, originally, before the company reversed the policy for the sake of shareholder value) banned LLM-generated posts because they amounted to a DoS attack on the system’s quality-control mechanisms. It takes five seconds to generate and post a short story’s worth of nonsense, but several minutes to determine that it’s nonsense and delete it. LLM-users enjoy churning out slop, but reviewers don’t enjoy reading it. Engaging in good faith is useless, because the LLM never learns from its mistakes. And letting those quality-control mechanisms be attacked causes clear harm to the community that relies on them. (This is where I first picked up the DoS analogy I’ve been using.)
After reading this thread, I’m convinced that we shouldn’t allow DoS attacks against this community either. It takes time and effort for reviewers to play and analyze the games. That time and effort should be devoted to things people care about, not fire-and-forget shovelware that took less time to create than it does to play through. And I’ve yet to see any compelling argument that LLM-generated IF is anything more than that.
EDIT: To be clear, this is my personal opinion as a member of the community, not an attempt to sway the IFComp judges, and not an official moderator ruling. Vote according to your heart and your own impression of the entries; please don’t go rate all the LLM entries a 1 without playing them. I haven’t tried any of the LLM entries in the current IFComp and have no idea if they’re any good or not; this post is based on my experiences in this thread and the examples posted in it.