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What's the motivation for Stack Overflow to allow AI-generated content in the first place? These AI models were likely heavily trained on SO data, so any LLM-b
by dlivingston 3y ago
What's the motivation for Stack Overflow to allow AI-generated content in the first place?
These AI models were likely heavily trained on SO data, so any LLM-based answer is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers before it.
In addition, asking a question on Stack Overflow and having some LLM respond seems to me like the equivalent of asking GPT-X.Y directly, albeit with extra steps.
- cosmolev 3y agoThere is a possibility that everything we output is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers, ideas, and thoughts we have encountered before. Including this comment of yours. And mine.
- endisneigh 3y agoI hate this sort of retort since it’s fundamentally meaningless. All atoms that will ever exist were in the singularity and exploded during the big bang to encompass all of the universe, and so we are all just moving along. Ok, so what.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Ukv 3y agoThe point of the retort is precisely to point out the meaninglessness when "regurgitation" is extended to include systems with some degree of generalization/extrapolation/discovery capabilities. The expectation set on AI seems to be to break information theory, "it's not original because it can only draw a horse (more accurately than a random guess) due to having trained on information about a horse" or so on.
- dvt 3y agoThere's this new trend of what I'll dub techno-nihilism, which is essentially a counterargument to the stochastic parrot argument. The former being: well what if WE are stochastic parrots, after all that's how we learn, right? Well yes, but actually no. It's trivially false because ChatGPT was trained on something (in this case, Stack Overflow), which, in turn was trained on something else (maybe a book), and so on. So knowledge, imagination, and genuine creativity must exist somewehere down that chain. Everything can't be just repeating what was learned prior ad infinitum, or we'd have nothing new. Ironically, even the development of large language models is an exercise in creativity.
- cosmolev 3y agoBut there is also this idea that you can't judge the system while being a part of it. You simply can't see the whole picture.
- dvt 3y agoTrue, but like solipsism or nihilism, those ideas are just not that interesting.
- amalter 3y agoOh, it's not an "interesting idea" that we're teetering on the edge of not being able to differentiate between machine-generated and human-generated content. It does seem that our AI learning models simply mimic our own thinking processes, absorbing and combining experiences to create results that sometimes outshine their origins. The real question that'll soon dominate is, "How can we even tell the difference?"* (* - Reworded with ChatGPT 4)
- pixl97 3y agoAt the sametime I think you may be overvaluing new answers and the importance of reiterating known answers in a method the user asking the question understands. For example, there is no intrinsic value in something new. If I take a new solution to a problem, lock it in a box, then it has zero value. It is not improving anyway. Now, if I take a solution and present it to you in a manner that you can understand, that has an inherent value to the end user. By this analogy attempting to say that LLMs are useless because they only know what already exists is far to harsh of measure because the vast volume of human output is rehashing what we already know.
- omnicognate 3y agoA possibility that every idea necessary to put the James Webb Space Telescope in place and analyse the data it collects from the universe's earliest and most distant galaxies was already present thousands of years ago, in fact must have somehow been built in to the first humans? I don't think there is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jatins 3y agoWhy is that a bad thing? People do ask very similar things on Stackoverflow so if an AI can answer that, let it!
- lelandfe 3y agoProbably scaling moderation to account for increasingly wrong and right-looking answers.
- joshuanapoli 3y agoI'd guess that valid human-authored submissions were being rejected by moderators because they appeared to the moderator to be AI-authored. Moreover, there is probably a significant grey area where a human selects among multiple AI answers and refines them. As a user of Stack Overflow answers, I don't care too much about who the author was. I do value the voting, comments and community on Stack Overflow, since they add confidence and color to an answer.