AMD just got accused of using AI-generated code that's full of "AI slop"

AMD has just been directly accused of submitting AI-generated code that hasn't been checked properly by a human to one of the longest-running open source software projects around. So unimpressed was the project with this submission that it took to X to complain about "your AI slop."

The project in question is FFmpeg, a video and audio processing tool and a related suite of libraries and programs. It's used in various capacities to perform video and audio transcoding operations in apps such as Chrome, Handbrake, OBS Studio, and VLC Media Player. Suffice to say, it's a high-profile project that AMD will want to keep on good terms.

Using AI to help write code of all sorts is far from an issue in and of itself. Indeed, it's rapidly becoming standard practice. However, it's well established that any code it generates should be checked by humans to ensure it works correctly, and ideally that it's well optimized and generally suitable for its intended use. It's that last step that AMD has been accused of ignoring with its latest commit (upload) to the FFmpeg project.

A developer on the project, Zhao Zilli, commented on AMD's new code submission, saying, "please ensure a thorough manual review of all AI-generated code before submission." They then go on to point out various aspects of the code that could be signs that a person had not properly checked it for "unnecessary" extra comments and generally non-standard coding techniques.

"AI-generated code tends to be verbose; it requires the developer's own judgment and cleanup," Zilli concluded.

Escalating the issue, a member of the FFmpeg team with access to its X account then screenshotted this comment and posted, "Hi @AMD. FFmpeg developer @quink_lamy is not happy with your AI slop patches."

Crucially, though, the AMD dev that submitted the post pushed back on these accusations stating that, "From my practice, those steps […] are necessary. This is not related AI or human. This is really my experience and my practices."

They then go on to explain why they felt the extra comments and explanations in the submission were necessary, but that they were happy to remove them. We've reached out to AMD for comment on the situation.

The submission itself was intended to add "support for AMD's HIP (Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability) SDK on Windows, enabling GPU-accelerated video processing on AMD GPUs." However, it was ultimately rejected on technical grounds, with other commenters pointing out that this support for GPU-accelerated video processing on AMD GPUs, such as the RX 9070 XT, already exists via their support for Vulkan.