That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.
This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.
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Rusty n Edie's: The world's friendliest BBS 216-726-0737
But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.
I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.
But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.
There's no such thing as bad publicity. If people who didn't know about your product become angry about your product, they're more likely to buy it.
100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.
I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors
Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.
It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.