I think this is a very well thought out approach to handling it. I can’t personally think of any better solutions, at least. I probably would have chosen some different phrasing for the tags, (CBH feels… Disconnected? I’d probably go with something like “No AI” or “AI-Free” instead), but that’s just a matter of personal diction. Outright banning posts about projects that use AI likely isn’t going to be feasible in the long run, and I think that simple declaration requirements will go a long way towards encouraging people to actually disclose their usage.

If you outright ban it, people will simply hide their usage. It feels like it’s akin to the US War On Drugs^TM^ in that way. If you allow it and simply require responsible disclosure, more people will be inclined to be upfront about it. And that allows projects to be more accurately audited and vetted. The same way the war on drugs consolidated power to organized gangs (by making them the only ones capable of producing and transporting illegal drugs at scale), an outright ban on AI would only encourage people to hide their usage.

One potential way I see people trying to skirt the rules regarding self-promos is via proxy/strawman accounts. It would be trivial for me to spin up a dummy account and post my own project as an “I found this cool project but don’t have to disclose my AI use because I didn’t make it” post. I don’t personally have any projects in the works to post about, but I can easily see someone using it to try and skirt the disclosure requirements. Especially when we have seen situations like the (now infamous) Huntarr debacle, where the vibe-coder dev was actively avoiding AI disclosures. Because they knew it would tank the project’s popularity if people knew it was vibe coded.

I’m not sure if there is a good solution for this potential issue, except maybe to limit posts by new users. But even that is trivial to bypass. If you limit them based on account age, simply making a few strawman accounts and waiting for them to age is easy. Hell, I already have a few old throwaway accounts that I could swap over to whenever I want, and I’m not even planning anything nefarious.

There are similar problems with restricting users based on post/comment count, as that will likely stifle discussion from new users who are trying to be active in the community. One of the more frustrating parts about Reddit was that many of the most popular subs banned posts from users who were below a certain post karma threshold or who didn’t have enough previous posts. It created a catch-22 where you needed to have a few popular posts before you were allowed to make any posts. So there were people posting on random niche subs, simply for karma farming before they could then post on the larger subs. And if I was a vibe coder without scruples who is already looking to skirt the rules, it would be trivial for me to spin up an LLM and let it make a few comments before I start using it as a dummy account.

This may end up being a non-issue in the grand scheme of things. But I figured I’d mention it, because I genuinely don’t see a good solution for patching the big glaring hole in the self-promo rule. You’re absolutely correct that requiring disclosure for every post is unrealistic, because lots of users who post projects here aren’t the devs. They just stumbled across a cool project and wanted to share it, and they have no realistic way of knowing if the project uses AI. And if you restrict promo posts to only devs, you’ll only get posts from the people who fall into the (likely very small) overlapping section on the “is a Lemmy user” and “makes projects” Venn diagram. Lemmy is already a small community in the grand scheme of things. And restricting promo posts to only the people actively developing the projects would make it feel even smaller.

If I do use mine, I’ll put it up on codeberg so everyone can see exactly what its doing… and then get mad and tell me there is a better way.

Poe’s Law is always in effect. The best way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it is to post an incorrect answer, because people will go out of their way to correct you.