More than some nefarious corpo, I think this is more an evolution of the same problem that existed before AI was popular.
Some people realised that their credibility as a job candidate was tied on a very surface level to their GitHub profile, so they sought to optimise it. They started going to cool projects and proposing absolutely stupid merge requests, like “replace single quotes with double quotes in README.md” or “improved spacing in this sentence” in the hopes that the developers would go “well why not”, so they could show that they contributed to tensorflow or redis or what have you. Already years ago, a lot of FLOSS projects were plagued by spam PRs.
Now coming up with absolutely stupid reasons to issue a PR is a tedious job and you have a very fierce competition of people doing the same thing as you, so… why not gain the edge with AI?
More than some nefarious corpo, I think this is more an evolution of the same problem that existed before AI was popular.
Some people realised that their credibility as a job candidate was tied on a very surface level to their GitHub profile, so they sought to optimise it. They started going to cool projects and proposing absolutely stupid merge requests, like “replace single quotes with double quotes in README.md” or “improved spacing in this sentence” in the hopes that the developers would go “well why not”, so they could show that they contributed to tensorflow or redis or what have you. Already years ago, a lot of FLOSS projects were plagued by spam PRs.
Now coming up with absolutely stupid reasons to issue a PR is a tedious job and you have a very fierce competition of people doing the same thing as you, so… why not gain the edge with AI?