Do NOT add AI to Scratch — #NoAIOnScratch

A_gamer_not_A_CODeR7

Blobfish_Industries wrote:
It's not that I'm against AI, I just don't see why it's being added to Scratch. As in, who asked for it?

This person apparently

Blobfish_Industries

A_gamer_not_A_CODeR7 wrote:
Blobfish_Industries wrote:
It's not that I'm against AI, I just don't see why it's being added to Scratch. As in, who asked for it?
This person apparently

In the discussion, they mention a flag shown on a project that used AI. This could be a good idea. It might display any prompts the user asked, and the responses. Not saying that this improves the aspect of AI, but it is something the ST should consider if they add AI to Scratch.

Last edited by Blobfish_Industries (March 2, 2026 23:24:28)

Ransom321Ransom

idk why people are so against ai on scratch it's used to help not create projects for people

Someone2939

Ransom321Ransom wrote:
idk why people are so against ai on scratch it's used to help not create projects for people

yeah. we should calm down instead of yelling like an example:

We need money to sue scratch team. Do we win?

That is a horrible idea.

-BluEagle-

Someone2939 wrote:
Ransom321Ransom wrote:
idk why people are so against ai on scratch it's used to help not create projects for people
yeah. we should calm down instead of yelling like an example:
We need money to sue scratch team. Do we win?
That is a horrible idea.

Pretty sure that second comment was a joke.

Last edited by -BluEagle- (March 3, 2026 00:41:53)

-BluEagle-

Ransom321Ransom wrote:
idk why people are so against ai on scratch it's used to help not create projects for people

Because of the following reasons:
Environmental Impacts
Over-reliance issues
Possibly harder for the Scratch Team & Scratch Foundation to keep the site running (mainly money wise)
Makes it easier for sprites to be stolen (the CLA can pull sprites but does not enforce credit)
Possible damage to creativity
Possible damage to learning skills
Possible damage to the ability of being able to debug
Possibility of the AI being frustrating (don’t get how you can get an 8 year old to speak in perfect specifics to a chatbot they are told is “easy” to use)
Using project assets (made mainly by children btw) to train the AI
I say possibly for some of these as I don’t wanna go ahead and assume, especially since the AI scratch is working on has likely changed since then and I dunno how the st operates

gamebuilder999999

-BluEagle- wrote:
Someone2939 wrote:
Ransom321Ransom wrote:
idk why people are so against ai on scratch it's used to help not create projects for people
yeah. we should calm down instead of yelling like an example:
We need money to sue scratch team. Do we win?
That is a horrible idea.
Pretty sure that second comment was a joke.

it was i even said that

-haruto--

yall are saying ai will damage our learning skills and i dont want the people of scratch to have their stuff chosen. we have people saying that this ai is a good thing and that we shouldnt complain even if it not creating whole project, but t his ai can overall stop yong users from coding

StarFutureFox

oh okay theres an st person here now…!

Anyways, alright I guess the memberships weren't created with AI ‘assistants’ and User Content™️* stealing in mind

good to know! | * joke borrowed from @scratchcode1_2_3

UH

Last edited by StarFutureFox (March 3, 2026 01:24:52)

pippy2011eight

StarFutureFox wrote:
oh okay theres an st person here now…!

Anyways, alright I guess the memberships weren't created with AI ‘assistants’ and User Content™️* stealing in mind

good to know! | * joke borrowed from @scratchcode1_2_3

UH

yes, cheddargirl has had to close the topic a few times due to off-topic spamm

StarFutureFox

pippy2011eight wrote:
StarFutureFox wrote:
oh okay theres an st person here now…!

Anyways, alright I guess the memberships weren't created with AI ‘assistants’ and User Content™️* stealing in mind

good to know! | * joke borrowed from @scratchcode1_2_3

UH

yes, cheddargirl has had to close the topic a few times due to off-topic spamm

yeah, I'm aware ‘

I was there to see it - I’ve been here since page 103 with spam TvT (she did leave though)

pippy2011eight

So, will people FINALLY stop with the misinformation? Please?

scratchcode1_2_3

codubee wrote:
(#3093)
Okay. Okay. Okay. NO. I'm sorry, I have to jump in now… Membership has absolutely ZERO to do with anything AI. Membership is _solely_ about ensuring Scratch can become self-sustaining. Something that Scratch has never been before. It was a point of frustration to me that we were not monetizing the brand of Scratch. Not monetize the users themselves, but to cut branding deals with companies that take the Scratch Cat and put it on the boxes of their products (DJI, a million other robotics kits folks, a hojillion other companies out there) without sending us any money they were making by using Scratch like that. We've changed that and have been actively working on multiple fronts to change this, including membership.

I'm gonna repeat this part: Scratch has never been any where near self-sustaining, from 2001-2026. The entire culture of the world does not seem to understand this as when we talk to vendors, they just see our user numbers and data rates and that we're associated with MIT (by name only now), and they assume we're loaded with cash that we don't have. There are tons of folks in companies that first reach out to us and want to offer us free services… until they see things like:

In the last year (March 2, 2025 → March 2, 2026), there were 1.18652 TRILLION HTTP requests that arrived at our services
We inadvertently added a new index to our primary DBs a few weeks ago, and the index alone added 100GB of data space usage
AWS charges far more for data transfer out than is reasonable. They charge at rates that could pay for more 24TB drives per month than we actually transfer out!
We are holding onto projects for people going back to 2013, and just having those in storage long term is a significant cost at this point.

Meanwhile, whenever people who know what it takes to run something like Scratch, find out how many people are involved in running it from a tech level, are _astonished_ that we're doing so much with so few folks, to the point where they often just don't believe, either the amount of traffic we deal with nor how we're doing it. In any case, again, this has nothing to do with anything AI.

Yes! I absolutely understand Scratch is not sustainable! So why not put the money you guys do have into actually making the website better? I know this sounds superficial, and you've heard it from everyone, since “better” is very subjective. However, I don't think wasting so much money on an AI “assistant” that the majority hates is a good idea.

Since you said it wasn't about AI though, the membership still has some flaws. The most blatant flaw is the potential for superiority complexes and/or bragging from people who have the membership since it shows up in so many places. It's pretty much advertised as a badge for any other membership, so you should consider rebranding it to something like “scratch donation badge” not “membership”.

But this thread is about AI, and the membership is a completely different argument. The membership, I've accepted it's something okay. It's not even that bad. The ToS? This is egregious. It's horrible. There's no other way to explain it. You could've done the membership without the whole garbage ToS and the AI training. If you're going to make an AI assistant, well, that's just not sustainable! There's no way to make AI sustainable without charging users a ridiculous amount of money. Unless they self host it, but most students have potato school laptops, and LLMs are very computationally expensive.

pippy2011eight

Guys! Codubee also commented this:

codubee wrote:
We haven't fully worked out how AI will be part of Scratch yet, so when you say, “add AI” what exactly do you mean? Because we don't even know exactly what that will mean yet…

king

Last edited by pippy2011eight (March 3, 2026 01:50:28)

scratchcode1_2_3

ajskateboarder wrote:
(#3077)
This is how most modern AI assistants are made today? How did you determine that Scratch has implemented the CLA “wrong?”

That's exactly why it sucks. Most “modern” (which is a funny word since all LLMs can be considered modern as the technology is only 4 years old) AI assistants are pretty much overhyped slopbots made by corporate directors who don't even know how LLMs work. LLMs can be great for a lot of things. But making what you want people to perceive as some omniscient digital entity is not possible using a flimsy little generative pre-trained transformer. From the demo video, they went with the good ol' “AI sidebar that takes up a third of your screen just for the hallucinating clanker to yap on” way of making an AI assistant, which is extremely overused. This is Scratch! Couldn't they have come up with better ideas in seconds?

Come on, skeumorphic/anthropomorphic AI assistant that refuses to do things for you but rather looks up learning resources for you, maybe even searches forum posts, actually shows you how to use the program instead of spitting out a few blocks and hallucinating food trucks? How do you even mess up the context that bad?

pippy2011eight

scratchcode1_2_3 wrote:
ajskateboarder wrote:
(#3077)
This is how most modern AI assistants are made today? How did you determine that Scratch has implemented the CLA “wrong?”
That's exactly why it sucks. Most “modern” (which is a funny word since all LLMs can be considered modern as the technology is only 4 years old) AI assistants are pretty much overhyped slopbots made by corporate directors who don't even know how LLMs work. LLMs can be great for a lot of things. But making what you want people to perceive as some omniscient digital entity is not possible using a flimsy little generative pre-trained transformer. From the demo video, they went with the good ol' “AI sidebar that takes up a third of your screen just for the hallucinating clanker to yap on” way of making an AI assistant, which is extremely overused. This is Scratch! Couldn't they have come up with better ideas in seconds?

Come on, skeumorphic/anthropomorphic AI assistant that refuses to do things for you but rather looks up learning resources for you, maybe even searches forum posts, actually shows you how to use the program instead of spitting out a few blocks and hallucinating food trucks? How do you even mess up the context that bad?

pippy2011eight wrote:
Guys! Codubee also commented this:
codubee wrote:
We haven't fully worked out how AI will be part of Scratch yet, so when you say, “add AI” what exactly do you mean? Because we don't even know exactly what that will mean yet…
king

scratchcode1_2_3

pippy2011eight wrote:
(#3121)
Guys! Codubee also commented this:
codubee wrote:
We haven't fully worked out how AI will be part of Scratch yet, so when you say, “add AI” what exactly do you mean? Because we don't even know exactly what that will mean yet…
king

This is the part that's concerning. If they spent so much time that they could create a semi-functional demo, and the best they could come up with is the generic sidebar chatbot, that's concerning. It's just kinda showing that it's all just a hype. It feels like there's not much thought and just rush. Rush to join in on the fun little chugga chugga choo choo hype train.

pippy2011eight

scratchcode1_2_3 wrote:
pippy2011eight wrote:
(#3121)
Guys! Codubee also commented this:
codubee wrote:
We haven't fully worked out how AI will be part of Scratch yet, so when you say, “add AI” what exactly do you mean? Because we don't even know exactly what that will mean yet…
king
This is the part that's concerning. If they spent so much time that they could create a semi-functional demo, and the best they could come up with is the generic sidebar chatbot, that's concerning. It's just kinda showing that it's all just a hype. It feels like there's not much thought and just rush. Rush to join in on the fun little chugga chugga choo choo hype train.

but it also means that if they haven't fully figured out how to implement it, we could move it to other things, like a better “clean up blocks” feature

ma007rio

C_h_a_r_l_o_tt_e wrote:
EDawg2011 wrote:
sup3r_r0ck wrote:
#3052
This forum is just causing arguing at this point someone should close it for a little bit
We need Scratch to listen to us. Maybe the Scratch Team can take down the flame wars instead of shutting down the whole topic.
SCRATCH TEAM IS LISTENING!!! AS IVE TOLD YALL 5MILLION TIMES ITS THE SCRATCH FOUNDATION THATS IMPORTANT

Well, it's important to note that the Scratch Team is currently powerless, so they can't do anything

scratchcode1_2_3

codubee wrote:
(#3095)
Magudragon wrote:
codubee wrote:
Amazing speech

So that means new projects after July 18th can finally be indexed?

The issue with indexing has absolutely nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with folks continuously working to get inappropriate stuff into trending. And, we're focusing on getting new things prepared and deployed this year which means we're pivoting to make all explore pages curated, while search still works. This is yet another side effect of not having nearly enough folks to work on things vs what we have now, and want to create in the future.

Hm… that sounds plausible. So how did you guys create that hour long demo showing the CLA? I really want to believe you, but there's no way you were working on that while also creating the hour long slopbot presentation, unless the AI itself was vibe coded.

Last edited by scratchcode1_2_3 (March 3, 2026 01:57:47)

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