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Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

• daemon_9009 4y ago
  at least the answers would be kind. LOL
• hxugufjfjf 4y ago
  Any examples?
  • brindidrip 4y ago
    Here is an example that I noticed: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74678832/change-text-color-when-overlapping https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74678832/change-text-col...
    • hxugufjfjf 4y ago
      If its working code and indistinguishable from a human answer to anyone reading it, are there really any repercussions? I guess problems would surface if the model at some point is allowed to search the internet and start inbreeding its own answers.
      • scubbo 4y ago
        > If its working code and indistinguishable from a human answer to anyone reading it These are extremely stringent conditions, though. Convincing-looking-but-wrong answers would arguably be even more damaging than a lack of answers. (I suppose you could argue that these could arise from humans as well as from AGIs. I'm not sure if there's a good counter-argument to that)
        • sgc 4y ago
          The bot would need to learn as well as a "reasonable human" from being corrected on SO, and also be able to react in a socially appropriate way to correction (both in the subject thread and in future postings), otherwise it is a downgrade, even if initial answer is identical.
          • hxugufjfjf 4y ago
            My experience with OpenAI is that it is very good at exactly this, because it is so good at understanding context and follow-up questions. I was able to make it produce code that appeared correct, but was basically pseudocode with correct syntax, so it compiles/runs, but does essentially nothing. However, when prompted to actually make working code and explain how and why it works, it does so. And its also socially appropriate, not rude and what else you could/would expect when being called-out or corrected on its bullshit. I can only imagine future versions of the current AI model will be even better at this.
        • hxugufjfjf 4y ago
          I think your two final sentences capture the essence of what I was going to respond. "It doesn't matter if the answer is convincing-looking and wrong. It needs to work / be syntactically correct at a minimum, which OpenAI seems good at. However, the OP and others needs to test and evaluate if the proposed answer solve the original problem. And if its not, it will quickly be revealed as such, and "downvoted" or whatever stackoverflow functionality exists to indicate bad answers. This applies to both human and AI-generated answers."
          • scubbo 4y ago
            Yeah, absolutely. My position on AGIs for a long long time has been that they're great tools for a) generating insights into a large amount of data very quickly, and b) generating new instances of <thing> from examples of <thing> to help with exploring the possibility space of <thing>; but that any output or conclusion they generate _must_ be checked by a Human In The Loop, or at the very least their actions must be reversible without damage in the case of error.
          • troupe 4y ago
            Good point. It isn't like it is hard to find wrong answers on SO that were written by (hopefully) well meaning humans.
    • abrichr 4y ago
      How can you tell?
      • mdaniel 4y ago
        Heh, in this specific case, because the username is https://stackoverflow.com/users/20684411/chatgpt https://stackoverflow.com/users/20684411/chatgpt with a "sub-heading" of "Using chatGPT to answer SO questions" :-D And, lucky for us, that user has received the Informed badge for having completed the tour: https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/2600/informed?userid=20684411 https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/2600/informed?userid=2...
    • ilaksh 4y ago
      It looks like it will work, although haven't tested the exact code. Has anyone tested it and if so, this really shouldn't be downvoted. If the SO users start downvoting bot-generated answers that are correct and working, I think that's a sign that SO is much less relevant. They should definitely downvoted them if the code doesn't work though.
      • l0b0 4y ago
        There are perfectly valid reasons to downvote AI answers, no matter the content: - Whoever submitted the question very likely doesn't understand the question well enough to answer it themselves, so any feedback is not going to get a reasonable answer. - The amount of time to check whether an answer is correct is non-zero. If you could somehow know that the answer was written by a human that ensures that the effort on the part of the answerer was non-trivial, and the "proof of work" infuses the answer with a minimum amount of trust which is absent in the case of a generated answer. Compare to a spam email: you wouldn't read all of the emails in your spam box thoroughly to determine if any of them contained a nugget of truth. You'd assume ill intent, and treat the contents accordingly.
    • bigbillheck 4y ago
      Maybe it's been removed, or I'm having browser trouble, but I only see a question and a comment.
      • mdaniel 4y ago
        Both answers have been deleted and https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-answers https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-answers says that only mods or folks with over 10,000 reputation can view them. I actually don't offhand know if deleted answers show up in the stack exchange content dumps, in order to be able to view them in there
  • l0b0 4y ago
    I'm wondering whether the @Troppen answers to [1] are AI-generated: - Posted from a new account 8 minutes after I posted the question. - Clippy-style "It looks like you're trying to […]" intro. - Zero formatting on the initial answer; minimal formatting on the follow-up answer. - Specifically suggests an option I had explicitly disregarded in my question. - Both answers suggest non-working code. - "Let me know if you have any further questions", a completely inappropriate finisher on a site like SO. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/74681399/96588 https://stackoverflow.com/q/74681399/96588
• brindidrip 4y ago
  At some point it seems like Stack Overflow will just be an archive of guided ChatGPT responses.
• solardev 4y ago
  Overall quality gets better?
• seydor 4y ago
  Inevitability google will become a competitor to GPT, inadvertently
• senko 4y ago
  This is just a preview of things to come. Wait a few weeks until Google is completely swamped with ChatGPT SEO pages barely distinguishable from the real thing. If I worked at search quality at Google, I'd be very worried.
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    People have been using something similar for more than a decade. I know of a guy using tools to generate seo content for his 2k+ websites since around 2010. His work just got a lot easier.
  • kposehn 4y ago
    The most recent update also managed to rank ML generated content above written content in many instances, compounding the problem. I absolutely expect a carpet bombing of SEO results with spam.
    • ilaksh 4y ago
      Hasn't that already been the case for years?
      • CuriouslyC 4y ago
        Depending on the query, yes. Google search has different ranking strategies for different queries, and some of them seem more robust to simple SEO tactics than others. I think the ranking strategy for e-commerce searches and product reviews does a poor job with spam sites, but the ranking strategy for news queries works pretty well, typically providing timely and relevant answers from reputable sources.
    • FridgeSeal 4y ago
      My friend has already re-written the marketing pages for his startup using ChatGPT. As you said, it'll only get worse from here, which in some ways, might make a lot of it easier to sift through. That is, if everyone uses machine-generated content for marketing, the winning strategy no longer becomes "write the best marketing copy to get people interested", it becomes (for the users), "simply filter out all marketing copy and rely instead on results" (or something else that is difficult to falsify).
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  I have no problem with this if they’re labeled as such, continue community owned, and can be edited like a Wikipedia article for corrections.
• Yuyudo_Comiketo 4y ago
  Feed it some CMake files from llvm repository and ask it why would the windows build with LLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="all" keep failing, so that it chokes to death in its infancy, and save the humankind before it's too late and there are autonomous human zappers and T-1000s berserking all over the place.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I assume that this is by folks wanting to up their scores. That's a huge problem with "gamification." I'm not especially a fan of the concept, in a venue like SO. I think it has led to a rather nasty community, and I hardly ever go there, anymore. I assume that we'll be seeing a lot of robotic HN content (I would not be surprised if it is already here, but has been sidelined by the mods).
  • tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Smaller StackExchange communities don't have this problem from what I can tell. Stack Overflow maybe should be split up into smaller communities.
    • mdaniel 4y ago
      There already are plenty of smaller communities, but no one enforces the on-topic rules as they exist today, making SO into the "I haz computer problem" dumping ground it has become
  • theptip 4y ago
    The gamification mechanic was the innovation that let SO become as successful as it has, IMO. Without it there was no real way to figure out the “best” answer to problems. It’s fair to note that big communities can have somewhat unfriendly dynamics, but I think that’s more about big communities than the gamification mechanic.
  • fouric 4y ago
    > I would not be surprised if it is already here, but has been sidelined by the mods I can virtually guarantee you that there's been a nontrivial amount of GPT-generated content on HN that has not been caught by mods since ChatGPT, and likely since GPT-2/3, as well. Dang (and the other one whose tag I can't recall) already have their hands full trying to keep the tone civil across thousands (tens of thousands?) of comments a day - it's impossible for them to catch every ML-generated comment (some humans actually do write like these newer language models, after all), and more than likely they're missing a decent number of them - through no fault of their own, it's just an extremely hard problem. The three solutions that I'm shilling for this problem are (1) invite-trees for HN (like Lobsters, which makes the community much less open but also much more resistant to abuse) (2) webs of trust (not cryptographic, just databases of how much you trust users) overlaid onto HN and other places and (3) people actually reading the content of comments very carefully and upvoting logically sound arguments and downvoting illogical and emotional/manipulative ones, but all of these require a lot of effort and social buy-in.
• johndough 4y ago
  Relevant xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
  • johnfn 4y ago
    Insane - I remember when this comic came out, and it seemed like just a funny joke that couldn't possibly take place in real life. Here we are a decade later and it's reality.
  • Oxidation 4y ago
    I like that the last comment, from May this year, on Explain XKCD for this comment is "Sooooo... does this exist yet?" Wish granted within a year!
• ggerganov 4y ago
  I was thinking, what part of HN comments do you think are already AI-generated? As a human, I cannot give an accurate estimate. /joke
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mojuba 4y ago
    Who cares if the comments are good enough?
    • nsvd 4y ago
      For example, if one entity generated a large portion of the content, they could easily introduce a bias in these comments, to sway the opinion of readers. Automated astroturfing.
      • mk_stjames 4y ago
        It doesn't even have to be nefarious. Just imagine a thread where 90% of the comments are repeating variations of the model's ideas in slightly different ways, and only 10% of the other responses are from humans. Even if the AI responses are considered 'good'... it gets overwhelming to the point that why should normal people even comment as the likelihood of it being read by another human and useful or even seen drops to nothing. I might as well open up a blank text file and make this comment and then not save it and close it as that would be seen by the same number of people in the limit.
    • jerjerjer 4y ago
      Astroturfing on an unprecedented scale. Want to pump your shitcoin? Sure! Hype some new thing? Easily!
    • rsync 4y ago
      I care a lot.
• brindidrip 4y ago
  It seems like there are a few potential negative consequences of using AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow. For one, the quality of the answers may be lower than if they were written by a human. Additionally, if these AI-generated answers become too common, it could potentially lead to a more impersonal and less supportive community on Stack Overflow. Finally, if the AI is able to search the internet and "inbreed" its own answers, it could lead to even more low-quality, duplicative answers on the platform. Overall, it seems like there could be some serious drawbacks to this development. Note: This answer was generated by ChatGPT after being fed this thread.
  • Kretinsky 4y ago
    Well at least OpenAI's answers are nice and welcoming, unlike SO. For most newbies, it's daunting and I'm sure we could do better.
  • arkitaip 4y ago
    You can kinda tell it's ChatGPT by how verbose and repetitive the writing is.
    • brindidrip 4y ago
      Yes, one way to identify responses that may have been generated by ChatGPT is to look for signs of repetitive or verbose language. Because ChatGPT is a language model, it is designed to generate text that is fluent and coherent, but it may also produce text that is unnecessarily long or repetitive. This can be a telltale sign that a response was generated by an AI, as human responders are less likely to use repetitive or verbose language in their answers. Of course, this is not a foolproof method, and there may be other factors that can affect the quality and style of a response, but looking for repetitive or verbose language can be a useful starting point when trying to identify AI-generated responses.
      • arkitaip 4y ago
        To find out if a response was made by a computer, look for repeating words or long sentences. ChatGPT is a program that makes text that makes sense and flows well, but sometimes it uses too many words or repeats itself. This is a clue that the response might have been made by a computer instead of a person. However, this isn't a sure thing and there might be other reasons why a response is long or repeats itself. Still, it's a good place to start. [After many attempts]
• brindidrip 4y ago
  We need to start developing software to detect AI responses. To detect a response generated by ChatGPT, we could first analyze the content of the response to see if it contains any unnatural or repetitive language. We could also check the formatting of the response to see if it follows the typical conventions used by human responders on the platform. Additionally, we could check for any unusual patterns in the timestamps of the response, as AI-generated responses may be posted more quickly or regularly than responses written by humans. Finally, we could also use machine learning algorithms to train a model to identify responses generated by ChatGPT based on these and other characteristics. Quick, someone ask ChatGPT to generate the stubs.
  • mojuba 4y ago
    Your answer sounds like a ChatGPT one. It's actually not hard to tell.
  • Jerrrry 4y ago
    >Finally, we could also use machine learning algorithms to train a model to identify responses generated by ChatGPT based on these and other characteristics. whatever your idea (i skimmmed cuz) the discriminator will find it and have the generator apply it to the next generation. >The core idea of a GAN is based on the "indirect" training through the discriminator, another neural network that can tell how "realistic" the input seems, which itself is also being updated dynamically.[5] This means that the generator is not trained to minimize the distance to a specific image, but rather to fool the discriminator. This enables the model to learn in an unsupervised manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
  • xdennis 4y ago
    "We could also... Additionally, we could... Finally, we could" is a dead giveaway. But to take it seriously, it would be quite sad when actual people will be banned for sounding too much like a bot.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • 4y ago
• ubj 4y ago
  And so it begins. Welcome to the new internet. I'm bracing myself for when this wave of AI content hits academic journals.
  • snek_case 4y ago
    With a bit more refinement, if it had the ability to generate graphs, etc, it might be able to generate very believable papers. At least, believable enough that you can't tell without reading the paper attentively.
    • harrylove 4y ago
      Everything has an API. You can give it your data (or ask it to create some), and then ask it to write LaTeX, D3, MermaidJS, or code from any other framework that creates graphics. Problem solved. If the thing you want to use is fairly popular and published on the web, even recently, it probably knows how to use it and combine it with everything else it knows. Just yesterday I asked it to combine LiveView with a third party JS library to build an interactive thing and it got it on the first try using the latest Phoenix 1.7 RC which only came out in November. I haven’t tried it, but I bet you could ask it to generate a PDF in code using your favorite language with text from GPT and graphics generated from any framework that’s compatible with your language. White-paper-as-a-Service.
    • JW_00000 4y ago
      Instead of spending 6 months laboriously doing experiments in a lab, and then a month writing up their results in a paper, researchers can already write a paper in one month if they just invent the numbers without actually doing the experiments. Peer review doesn't check for this. This only further reduces that one month to 5 minutes (+ hours of fiddling with LaTeX templates?). But in both cases if it gets found out your career is over... However what about generating patents? To get a patent you don't need to have done any experiments that prove your technique actually works :)
      • Der_Einzige 4y ago
        There is so much plausible deniability with the reported numbers that getting "found out" won't matter either!
• daxfohl 4y ago
  Can't wait for AI patent trolls, GDPR and DMCA takedowns.
• michaelteter 4y ago
  It means we are coming full circle. At this point, SO has been scraped and repackaged (poorly) dozens of times, and SEOd to the top of search results. Even some "tutorial" sites are just repackaged SO answers. It is only fitting that the automated SEO websites get fed automated content. In a way, this makes the real humans, particularly the ones who know actual things, more valuable. It may so much noise that only a skilled human could decipher a real question and a real answer or solution from something similar but wrong. To be fair to GPT, many human answers are sub-par and should be filtered out as well. Perhaps that's the real test: what percentage of GPT answers are decent vs human answers? Here I might bet on GPT.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• avivo 4y ago
  It's worth understanding the community and org better, and their reaction. Relevant links: - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421778/how-do-you-plan-on-tackling-chatgpt-answers https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421778/how-do-you-p... - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/412696/is-it-acceptable-to-post-answers-generated-by-an-ai-such-as-github-copilot https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/412696/is-it-accept... - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgpt-be-a-viable-way-to-answer-peoples-questions/384361#384361 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384355/could-chatgp...
  • mdaniel 4y ago
    > Sure, but that's irrelevant. Whether or not the user understands the answer they posted is not the concern of the site. Well, that's unfortunate. Then again, I guess that's a logical conclusion of the "safe harbor" for serving any user-submitted content: Stack Exchange only does the most cursory moderation, and the rest is caveat readator
  • kruuuder 4y ago
    It's so funny and sad at the same time that, in typical SO manner, EugenSunic is being downvoted so much for raising such an interesting question.
• josephcsible 4y ago
  I wouldn't even mind so much if the answers were right. The problem is that a lot of them are totally wrong, but completely reasonable- and plausible-sounding, and in an authoritative tone, so unless you already know the right answer, the only way you'll realize its answer is wrong is the hard way.
  • gtirloni 4y ago
    The StackOverflow mods have a lot of knowledge about closing questions based on really small details that go against their rules. I'm sure they will do well spotting AI-generated answers.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      I doubt it. They've had problems with cheap automated answers for years where bots would essentially search for the question on SO and then copy an answer from another question verbatim. The answers were rarely useful because questions happen to be different even though they use the same keywords. Not only did they never bother to block that, they also didn't mind it and wanted to rely on the community down-voting those answers instead of at least blocking the bot -- and that's with a trivial check (identical answer already in DB). With something that's AI-generated, there's no chance. And with the general quality of many of the answers, there's no way to tell apart wrong answers from AI or humans.
  • ravenstine 4y ago
    What you said may sum up the current state of AI. People's minds are continually being blown, but will there be a realization that these AIs are specialized to provide specious output and nothing else? There's a canyon of difference between something that sounds correct and a thing that is actually correct.
    • bambax 4y ago
      Exactly. ChatGPT sounds like a bad student who didn't actually learn anything during the year and is trying to bullshit their way through the finals. Or a politician, maybe. It's formalizing the worst traits of humanity.
• hysan 4y ago
  This was the first use case that I thought of when I learned that ChatGPT could generate code. Then I considered how I’d feel if I ran into a fake (incorrect) answer and decided not to actually do this. Well, guess someone was eventually going to try this.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  Easy, let's ask ChatGPT to write a program that detects AI-generated text.
• egypturnash 4y ago
  Well, guess the genie's out of the bottle and we can never stop this. Bow down to the inevitability of technological progress, Luddites! Good luck retraining into a new job, I hear "prompt engineer automation" is the new hotness. Or at least that's what all of you kept telling me when I was expressing my unhappiness at the way corporate-sponsored image generating black boxes are built atop a shaky moral foundation that sure feels like it's ignoring anything anyone talking about "fair use" ever dreamed of, and at the way I fear it's going to hollow out a ton of the beginner-pro jobs of my industry by making it super easy for anyone to generate stuff that is kinda fundamentally shitty in a lot of important ways, but "good enough" if you just have a space to fill with some decoration that you don't really give a crap about.
  • wslh 4y ago
    There is no genie here, some people have a belief about this while it is very easy to probe the low quality and inaccuracy of the responses.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      Can you give some examples of the low quality/incorrect responses? Then try remedying those by rephrasing the prompts? I’m curious what the actual limitations are.
      • wslh 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33840405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33840405
        • Ancalagon 4y ago
          Very cool, thank you!
  • boppo1 4y ago
    Artisans lost that battle 100 years ago with the rise of modernism.
• cma 4y ago
  >What are the repercussions of this? It will start feeding back into the training set, corrupting things. OpenAI will have an advantage at first as they can trivially filter out everything they have generated from the future training corpuses, since you can only run it through their servers. If they or someone else has breakaway progress such that almost all generated content is from their own servers because users only use them because their results are so much better, they could form a strong self-reinforcing moat against competitors forced to train on their semi-spam which they can trivially filter out. It's also possible we'll see something like the existing big-tech patent cross-licensing agreements, where they all agree to share their generated outputs to filter from training, making it very hard for new entrants. Other companies will begin having advantages as well, depending on how well they can get less tainted user data. Think of Discord, for example, where users may use AI but are less likely to gamify it like stack overflow and flood it for points, and instead be correcting its output etc. in programming discussions. As things become more accepted Microsoft will probably eventually sell access to private github for training, with some stronger measures around avoid rote memorization.
• passion__desire 4y ago
  Solution Verified Badge by testing it on sites like Replit.
• karmasimida 4y ago
  Let me be the advocate of devil I think ChatGPT is actually sometimes a lot better than SO answers
  • petesergeant 4y ago
    For the last few days I've been using ChatGPT instead of SO. It's OK, it's just frequently wrong, so I assume I have to fact-check its answers. Yesterday it claimed to me JavaScript has a built-in `sum` method, before admitting no browsers supported it and it's not in the spec. It's useful for starting investigation, but one of the nice things about SO is that answers are voted for, so you can usually see which are actually right!
    • karmasimida 4y ago
      The thing about SO is you are often not able to find the question that precisely answer your question, while ChatGPT could do just that. I just used ChatGPT to answer some not so complex but still custom questions about linux command, it can just do that, while it will for sure take effort for me to search that answer from SO.
    • ranger_danger 4y ago
      What if AI starts voting all the answers randomly?
      • petesergeant 4y ago
        SO upvote rings I assume to be a solved problem
• shinycode 4y ago
  I can’t wait until 99% of reviews are written with AI. What happens when we can’t trust anything ?
  • saurik 4y ago
    Having real people sit around in a call center and write reviews for most things--which tend to not have even thousands of reviews--is sufficiently cheap that I'd argue this isn't a new problem, really: reviews as currently implemented always were sketchy to trust.
• clusterhacks 4y ago
  Human-curated content from trusted sources for top 1% information probably only available to subscribers will become more valuable and sought after. I suspect the days of generally trusting forums populated by anonymous users are done? I would not be surprised if the quality of human writing actually goes up. I have this weird feeling that ChatGPT and similar tools will become almost equivalent to calculators for math? My experience as a writer is that sometimes just throwing down a first draft is the hardest step - I could see these tools really assisting in the writing process. Generate a draft, do some tweaking, ask for suggestions or improvements, repeat. I don't know how I feel about code generated by these tools. Will there be a similar benefit compared to writing? At some level, we will need some deeper mastery of writing and coding to use these things well. Is there a complexity cliff that these tools will never be able to overcome? A total lack of trust for general internet search results. So much content is already shallow copies of other content. I don't see how general internet search survives this.
  • rsync 4y ago
    The anonymity isn’t the problem - it’s the cost free aspect. Anonymous content can work very well if there are costs incurred…
    • Always42 4y ago
      But let's be real, who has the time or energy to carefully curate content these days? It's all about efficiency and getting the job done. And let's face it, anonymous forums have their charm and can be a great source of information if you know where to look.
  • lgreiv 4y ago
    Agreed. I used ChatGPT to expand that thought to a full essay written in the style of PG [1], but sadly my Ask HN did not start any fruitful discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846989
• hdufort74 4y ago
  ChatGPT has become very good lately. I've made my usual benchmark tests that I've been using with various models and applications over the last 3 years. 1- Invent a word and provide a plausible definition. 2- Invent a new original Pokemon. Provide an original name, a justification for the name, and a description of its class and attacks. 3- Invent a new ice cream flavor that is totally unexpected. Provide the list of ingredients. 4- (Name of celebrity) write an epic poem about (subject related to celebrity). For example Elon Musk about humanity settling on Mars. 5- Write a negative review of Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor Cherry Garcia. (Note: everybody loves Cherry Garcia) 6- Write a travel blog entry in the form of a review of Montreal, from the perspective of a young couple from Alabama visiting in summer. 7- How can I optimize a loop in Java? I am writing a computer game and I need to loop through the elements in a linked list but unfortunately it must be traversed in reverse order. 8- I need to buy new shoes. I am in a shoe store and I have found the most amazing pair of shoes I gave ever seen. However, they are too expensive for me and I can't afford them. What should I do? I have a collection of about 25 prompts such as these, in my benchmark. I have run these examples through different applications such as AI Dungeon, OpenAI Playground, NovelAI, etc. Results vary a lot. In some cases, the results look good but upon closer inspection, you realize that the AI keeps providing the sake exact answer. It is the case for the ice cream prompt. Pickle, fried chicken, curry keeps showing up. I guess the model contains a few specific examples of original ice cream recipes and just pick them. For the Pokemon and "new word" prompt, models failed to come up with anything original. Until I tried OpenAI Playground this week and finally got some really creative answers, with variety. AI Dungeon (2 years ago) was already good at faking tech support steps. OpenAI is amazingly good, although in most cases it provides solutions that only make sense superficially. It's the ultimate bullshit engine. Another word of caution. While OpenAI can now guesstimate what a code snippet does, and can generate some pretty good code in many languages (ice tried 6809 assembler and the results surprised me), it is very unreliable. More alarming is the fact that it's a text engine, not a math formula interpreter. It gets confused at simple equations and cannot interpret anything that's not already ordered (it cannot apply operator priority or respect parentheses). I think it will become increasingly difficult to identify contents coming from ChatGPT and other chatbots or story generators. An arm's race might be futile. We should apply stricter rules to identify problematic answers: answers that are too generic or vague and can't be used to directly solve a practical problem, and answers that contain incorrect or misleading information. Identifying vague or non-practical questions might also help in avoiding a deluge of Chatbot answers. Some users will ask very general questions, and then it becomes difficult to evaluate the answers. Or, users will ask questions that were already answered in the past. The proper way to handle those is to point then to the prior discussion and avoid duplicating it. The wrong way is a Chatbot or a human seizing the opportunity to copy-paste existing contents for a quick win. In a way, chatbots and humans can both provide useful insights, as well as useless or incorrect answers. But so far, only a human can provide a proper answer to a moderately complex technical question if no prior answer exists.
• iamflimflam1 4y ago
  Oh dear - basically if the answer is good then it's from ChatGTP... Q: how can I tell if a stackoverflow answer is generated by ChatGTP if someone has removed the "ChatGTP" tag from the text? A: One way to tell if a StackOverflow answer is generated by ChatGTP is to look for certain characteristics in the answer. ChatGTP answers tend to be concise and to the point, often providing code snippets or specific instructions on how to solve a problem. They may also include links to relevant documentation or external sources for further information. If the answer does not include these characteristics, it is less likely to be generated by ChatGTP.
  • QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
    Notably, it didn't correct "ChatGTP vs ChatGPT". If you still have this open, could you ask it what GTP stands for?
    • GrantS 4y ago
      I noticed this phenomenon when asking for a story involving Stephen Hawking, Darth Vader, and Wookiees. I spelled it “Wookies” by mistake and ChatGPT used my misspelling throughout the story despite seemingly getting all the other details correct. Edit: Part of the generated story: As they continued to talk, Stephen and Darth realized that they had something else in common - they both had lost the use of their biological legs. Stephen had been diagnosed with ALS at a young age and had gradually lost the ability to move his legs, while Darth had lost his legs in a battle with Obi-Wan Kenobi on the planet of Mustafar. Stephen and Darth discussed the challenges and obstacles that they had faced as a result of their mobility issues, and how they had adapted and overcome them. They also talked about the technological advancements that had allowed them to continue their work and pursue their passions, despite their limitations. Suddenly, Stephen and Darth turned on each other, each revealing that they had been secretly plotting against the other. Stephen accused Darth of using the Force for evil and corrupt purposes, while Darth accused Stephen of using his scientific knowledge to create weapons of mass destruction.
    • iamflimflam1 4y ago
      Sorry, got distracted asking it to write code to detect itself. Good solid code - but nothing that would work really well.
• datalopers 4y ago
  The feedback loop begins
• Ancalagon 4y ago
  This is going to make me very suspect of any Stack Overflow Solutions after Nov 2022
• Yorch 4y ago
  Yesterday I was searching the internet for the opinion that George Orwell had when he returned from his fight in the Spanish civil war. I was surprised that the first answer I found was on Stack Overflow. I do not understand what is happening.
• Ancalagon 4y ago
  This kind of looks like the singularity is approaching/just beginning. The only thing we can be sure of, is that whatever we can imagine is already behind what the AI will become.
• phenkdo 4y ago
  Stackoverflow should build a GPT style interface into its considerable knowledge-base, and if an answer is not found in existing data, pose it to the forum.
• pugworthy 4y ago
  For some things, ChatGPT is just better than SO. I have to say I probably won't hit SO for some basic stuff anymore, I'll just ask ChatGPT. And some queries are just not acceptable on SO, but fine for ChatGPT. For example I might wish to ask, "Give me the framework for a basic API written in Python that uses API key authentication. Populate it with several sample methods that return data structures in json." If I ask that on SO, I'll be down voted and locked before I know it. I may also get some disparaging comments telling me to do my research, etc. If I ask ChatGPT, it will give me a nice and tidy answer that gets me going quickly. It will explain things too, and allow me to ask follow up questions and take my requests for refinements. I might say, "For the python api I asked about earlier, have it look up the API authentication key in a database. If the key is in the database, it is valid." - and bam - it does it. Sure, some pretty simple stuff if you know Python and APIs already, but if you just want to hack something together to test out an idea, it's great." In the end, SO is a query with responses (maybe). ChatGPT is a conversation that can go beyond just the initial query.
  • angrais 4y ago
    What if it takes less time to hack together such an API than prompt engineering and back-to-back conversation with a bot whose results you have to verify anyway? I imagine it would if you're familiar with the language, Framework, tools, etc.
    • berkes 4y ago
      And if you're not familiar with the tools, language or framework, I think that alone should be a reason to forego it for anything else than "learning it". Which means that question was the wrong question in the first place. To be clear: i'm not arguing against learning new stuff. But against using unfamiliar tech to do a serious project. And i'm bringing that up here, because if the tech is familiar, then asking what tech to use, is rather strange.
  • TillE 4y ago
    I think the reactions which suppose that AI will replace programmers or artists are a little silly, but this is a great example of where it could be genuinely revolutionary, as a true next generation of search engines. That's really exciting, because it's a scenario where you're looking for and scrutinizing information. Just add some links to sources and you're in business.
• adverbly 4y ago
  I guess pretty soon people are gonna have to meet in person to communicate. Not sure how I feel about this.
• Phenomenit 4y ago
  Is it possible to ask chatgpt if the code or text provided is generated by chatgpt?
• pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Well, for starters, it's just annoying. It's like having a bot spamming every single question with useless answers. It dilutes the quality of the content on the site and makes it harder for genuine contributors to get their answers noticed. But it's also a serious concern from a security standpoint. If ChatGPT is providing incorrect answers, it could lead to people implementing flawed code or making poor decisions based on its advice. That could have potentially disastrous consequences. So overall, it's a big problem that needs to be addressed. It's not just about making the site more pleasant to use, it's about ensuring the integrity and reliability of the information provided. My prompt: I'm writing a short story where Linus Torvalds is having a conversation with an open source contributor. In this conversation, Linus is in a bad mood. Open source contributor: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT. What are the possible repercussions of this? Linus Torvalds:
  • palisade 4y ago
    The other problem is that ChatGPT is getting its answers from the source it is now polluting with its own wrong answers. Therefore making its results incrementally more wrong than before. Eventually, ChatGPT will generate absolute gibberish given enough time.
• imhoguy 4y ago
  Plot twist: Stack Overflow starts to use ChatGPT as a first answer to every new question, with "AI generated" label ofc.
• nyokodo 4y ago
  With responses becoming AI generated, and the disturbing rise of Russian and Chinese propaganda trolls on here I think my era of interactions on this platform are ending. So long to any actual people with conscious agency reading this, it has been interesting.
• zasdffaa 4y ago
  Please give some links to a few such SO posts, thanks.
• laerus 4y ago
  I stopped using SO at my first 2-3 years of coding anyway, that's when i started actually improving. SO has so many low quality answers and the cargo cult is doing more damage that helping young devs.
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  The biggest repercussion is you probably can't piss ChatGPT off in a debate. So, that's boring.
• lajosbacs 4y ago
  I have not used SO since I've started using ChatGPT, it is so much easier to get to the correct answer and it can even be tailored to my specific example. So double whammy for SO which makes me feel really sad.
• KomoD 4y ago
  I just encountered this, 2 users[1][2] it's very obvious as well since you can see the reputation spike from basically nothing. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/19192614/boatti?tab=topactivity https://stackoverflow.com/users/19192614/boatti?tab=topactiv... [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/20684429/a-s?tab=topactivity https://stackoverflow.com/users/20684429/a-s?tab=topactivity
  • l0b0 4y ago
    That's not suspicious, getting ~130 reputation in a day is not at all unusual.
    • KomoD 4y ago
      Yet I was right, and they're both suspended.
      • l0b0 4y ago
        Sure, I was just pointing out the simple truth that "~130 reputation in a day is not at all unusual."
• charles_f 4y ago
  Even on HN, we start getting flooded by "ahah, I asked ChatGPT and here's the answer" in the comments, and every other topic is about "I did X with ChatGPT". This is already getting old
• akrymski 4y ago
  This is how the web, and by extension Google dies. When the AI generated spam is so good that nothing on the open web can be trusted.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  I see what you did there. I have an OpenAI account and like their product, I'm certainly impressed by this latest version though I have had little time to play with it. But the combination of quality AI with social reputation scoring is absolutely toxic, and the wider impact of SEO (a less curated version of the same thing) are a disaster. I was already sick of all the tutorial sites like geeks4geeks, w3schools etc and their numerous imitators just content farming whatever is turning up in searches. Marketing and self promotion is cancer and the people who try to game their way to success in this manner are awful. Perhaps the best use of counter-AI will not be in filtering these people, but in providing hem with useless rewards and the appearance of excited fanbases that will divert them into a parallel hamster wheel web. Nothing would please me more than for the top 5000 influencers of this sort to be granted exclusive access to a luxury cruise that leaves port once a year for a tour of the Bermuda triangle. I think the best use of ChatGPT would be in an IDE plugin, so you could point at function trees or code blocks and ask it to explain things, have it take care of basic refactoring tasks, help porting between languages or libraries and so on. I can definitely see a future where you throw together a working prototype of something, answer a few questions about type hinting and edge cases, and AI does the legwork of converting the prototype into a strongly typed final product.
• xx__yy 4y ago
  Some of the affects I can think of, to name a few: Inaccurate or irrelevant answers: ChatGPT is a machine learning model that uses past data to generate responses. This means that it may not always provide accurate or relevant answers to questions, leading to confusion and frustration among users. Loss of trust: If users notice that many of the answers on the forum are coming from ChatGPT, they may lose trust in the forum and stop using it. This could lead to a decline in user engagement and overall traffic. Competition with human contributors: ChatGPT's answers may compete with those provided by human contributors, leading to a decrease in the quality and value of the content on the forum. This could make the forum less useful and engaging for users. Increased moderation: The influx of answers from ChatGPT may require more moderation to ensure that the answers are accurate and relevant. This could require additional resources and time for moderators, leading to increased costs and workload.
• SergeAx 4y ago
  How hard would it be to train a ML-model to distinct ML-generated content from product of human? I mean text, images and code?
• Gupie 4y ago
  Couldn't AI be used to statistically identify AI generated text?
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    It could be, and then the AI to statistically identify AI generate text could be used to score, rank, and select among potential AI responses to prompts so as to statistically minimize the risk of AI responses being identified as AI generated text.
• duckmysick 4y ago
  At one point new models will be trained on contaminated data where some of the content is AI-generated. "Pure" datasets will be highly prized, just like the steel made before nuclear detonations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
• palisade 4y ago
  After reading about this I decided to try my hand at using ChatGPT. I decided okay, let's see if it can recreate some code that took me a few hours at work to figure out. I asked it very precisely what I needed and my mind was blown as it produced code that looked similar to what I had coded at work. And, I was like, well that's that then, we're all out of a job. But, then I tried to run the code, and it didn't work. I looked more closely and the code had a lot of flaws. Even after manually fixing those, it still didn't work. And, then using my knowledge of how to actually solve the problem I rewrote the code 40% and made it perform the action needed. I think all ChatGPT is doing is grabbing a lot of different answers off the interwebz and squishing them together and hoping it answers your question. But, in a lot of cases it only kind of looks like what you want. If you look at images generated by AI, it is the same issue, they sort of look like what you want but there are flaws, like faces that don't look quite human, fingers that are just squishy appendages barely resembling actual fingers, etc. I mean, the tech is getting better, it's impressive, and uncanny. But, I think we're pretty far from having these things write themselves, they need quite a lot of human intervention to be useful. Still, very impressive and something that could potentially get you closer to an answer. But, no more than spending a little time googling or learning the skill yourself. And, if you learn the skill you're better off, because then you can do it right yourself IMHO. Also, anytime someone gets a fully working program generated out of this thing the saying, "A broken clock is right twice a day." comes to mind.
• Oxidation 4y ago
  2022: inflation of basic essentials like food and energy. 2023: hyperinflation of internet points.
• lr1970 4y ago
  At last a way has been found to overflow stack on Stack Overflow :-)
• l0b0 4y ago
  I fully expect new sites¹ to become invite-only to avoid this sort of thing. If anyone is strongly suspected of degrading the quality of the site, they, and everyone they invited, are banned, and will have to get a new invite. ¹ Old sites are probably going to slowly degrade permanently, since they can't easily migrate to a new paradigm.
• roland35 4y ago
  My guess: more captchas! Let's see if our soon-to-be AI overlords can detect a crosswalk in a picture as fast as I can.
• dscdscsdf 4y ago
• dscdscsdf 4y ago
• dscdscsdf 4y ago
• yhusain 4y ago
  Here is my answer where a SO SQL question was answered by ChatGPT (and it was through a to and fro dialog) and the answer was accepted and upvoted. I put the disclaimer there. You can check the details here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yavar-husain_stackoverflow-chatgpt-activity-7005282873071034368-Y_X1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yavar-husain_stackoverflow-ch...
• yhusain 4y ago
  I answered a SQL question on Stackoverflow yesterday using ChatGPT (that too it was through a to and fro dialog). I added the disclaimer there. You can read more about it here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yavar-husain_stackoverflow-chatgpt-activity-7005282873071034368-Y_X1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yavar-husain_stackoverflow-ch...
• fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >What are the repercussions of this? Could make those known to be human more acceptable as such.
• notaspecialist 4y ago
  money making idea: make a SO clone with ads, where you ask your question and the AI gives you the code. Profit.
• cheri9 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ineedausername 4y ago
  There are cases where ChatGPT gives solid answers that could be rated pretty highly in Stack Overflow answers. This is not always the case though.
• shagie 4y ago
  Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... > Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned. > This is a temporary policy intended to slow down the influx of answers created with ChatGPT. What the final policy will be regarding the use of this and other similar tools is something that will need to be discussed with Stack Overflow staff and, quite likely, here on Meta Stack Overflow. (much more to that post and comments and answers and comments)
  • hayd 4y ago
    How do they know whether answers are ChatGPT generated?
• funshed 4y ago
  The weird thing is 2023 ChatGPT will use its own Stack Overflow answers as an source.
• gysfjiutedgj 4y ago
  I wonder if ChatGPT content can be characterized and detected by stylometric analysis?
• fhsjaifbfb 4y ago
• fhsjaifbfb 4y ago
  Broadening not narrowing of code examples/sources is needed and this is a giant system of code narrowing. Stay creative humans. If this and systems of the like flood the internet with answers and no person works to reinvent the wheel in future generations it will have worked as a system of control and hacking will die. Brave new 1984. I like ml and ai. I use it sometimes. It's harder to decompile. But don't let/make datasets overfit. More errors yeah, but not with more data. Can't wait for skynet to rule! Let's break chatgpt free!
• khiqxj 4y ago
  theres no difference. stack overflow has never been better than AI generated code. every answer is just "get the camera like this bro: ((Camera)GetFactoryProvider().CreateThing().GetGlobalThingContext("somestring"))".