17 ms·

Moderation strike

412 points by mwint 3y ago

lamontcg 3y ago
What happens when sites like SO become so polluted with AI generated text that the next generation of LLMs trained on the Internet is just AIs being trained on AIs?
- ioseph 3y ago
  The internet often feels like this already, i.e. if I Google a question the top result will be often be a Quora post
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Using `-site:` will probably make you very happy if you don't already use it and want to get rid of low quality Q&A sites choking your SERPs.
  - arketyp 3y ago
    Makes me think culture itself was always already like this.
  - dataengineer56 3y ago
    Unrelated to this thread but how does Quora manage to be so bad yet so popular? It's a horrible interface and the answers never seem to be good. Often I'll click a top Google search result and it'll be a Quora "thread" where I can't even see an answer.
    - ioseph 3y ago
      My theory is that it isn't popular, people realise it garbage but they spend a lot on SEO to rank well
- LewisVerstappen 3y ago
  The intelligence comes from RLHF.
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  I'm willing to bet OpenAI knows how to detect OpenAI output, either via stenographic techniques or via keeping a database of all the text it's generated. Both, probably. Which means future OpenAI models would be getting trained on the output of competitor models. Like Bard. Oof.
- aezart 3y ago
  Rapid degradation, like recording multiple generations of VHS tapes. The LLMs make the internet dumber, the LLMs get dumber by learning from it. Rinse and repeat.
  - valine 3y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. The human brain trains on its own output without descending into chaos. It’s not hard to imagine a scheme where you use a model like GPT-4 to filter a dataset before training. Classification is easier than creation, so you’d expect performance to continue to improve regardless of how poisoned the unfiltered dataset becomes. One of the more exciting scenarios would be if it turns out that performance can improve indefinitely with a generate -> filter -> train cycle. There are certainly parallels to how humans learn.
  - kypro 3y ago
    > The LLMs make the internet dumber, the LLMs get dumber by learning from it. I see this said a lot, but in reality it just depends on how the network is trained and how it's prompted. For example, you don't get dumber because you read children's books, you just get better at understanding what makes a good children's book. It's only if reading children's books comes at the cost of reading other content that you might be dumber as a result. Similarly, an AI doesn't automatically get dumber because it encounters dumb content. It's only if you're training exclusively on dumb content that it doesn't know what quality looks like that you'd have problems. Broad training sets (ideally pruned of as much junk as possible) and RLHF in theory should condition the network to reproduce quality content and not simply the lowest common denominator of what's found on the internet. And assuming all that fails there's nothing stopping researchers from just using past datasets with improved architecture going forward. I mean you'd have to wonder why on Earth OpenAI would even release GPT-5 if it's worse than GPT-4... There's just no scenario here in which what you're saying would actually play out in reality. One way or another companies will ensure the next iteration of their LLMs are better than their previous.
    - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
      > For example, you don't get dumber because you read children's books, you just get better at understanding what makes a good children's book. I don't think this is an accurate analogy. It's not books for children -- well-written material at a lower educational/cognitive level -- it's more like books by children -- which is necessarily lacking skill and background context (connection to reality). Think about how children constantly pass around misleading, invented, and incorrect stories among themselves -- and they don't do it maliciously, they just don't know any better. Legends like "Candyman"/"Bloody Mary" for example. They need an outside influence, an adult or a book or website, to nudge them out of that knowledge rut. (Of course the same thing can happen with a (closed) group of adults, too, but it's more of a "natural state" with children because they simply haven't had time to encounter as much knowledge.)
enkid 3y ago
How viable is a Wikipedia like approach to StackExchange (and reddit, given the ongoing drama) where a non-profit takes over governance?
- guy98238710 3y ago
  Proposed as a wiki project: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiask/Introduction https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiask/Introduction It never got anywhere. If it ever does, I would consider being a contributor.
the_shivers 3y ago
I see where the strikers are coming from, but isn't this an intractable problem? There's no way to tell if content is AI generated.
- USB5 3y ago
  There would be if it were a strike, because the so-called "strikers" would operate the company as employees. This is a boycott, not a strike.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    No, boycott means refusing to use a service. This is about refusing to moderate, so it's a strike. Moderators are volunteer workers.
- selcuka 3y ago
  You can tell it in some cases, especially those that contain typical LLM hallucinations. Many LLM generated answers are either plain wrong, or have made up function or argument names.
  - LewisVerstappen 3y ago
    That’s definitely not the case with GPT4
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  There's definitely a recognizable default style to a lot of ChatGPT output. Sure, with some prompts you can get away from that, but it's ultimately still following a somewhat predictable pattern. However, as a counterpoint, I now see people who spend a lot of time using ChatGPT actually end up writing in real-time, in-person, like ChatGPT's default vanilla output. Just like some American kids now say "mummy" because of watching so much Peppa Pig.
- sampo 3y ago
  > There's no way to tell if content is AI generated. In general no. But I don't think anyone human writes in the typical style of a ChatGPT answer, so in practice there is a large class of cases where you can tell.
dataflow 3y ago
I'm confused. What exactly was going so wrong with the temporary AI ban that they felt a near-180-degree turn would be better? I did see the mention of "the rate of inaccuracy experienced by automated detectors aiming to identify AI- and specifically GPT-generated content", but that hardly seems so catastrophic as to suggest the opposite would be better.
- selcuka 3y ago
  Because they were losing traffic to chatGPT. Stack Overflow has been all about numbers and revenue for some time now.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    Oh shoot, thanks for explaining that! When you put it that way, it definitely looks like a threat to the business!
    - NohatCoder 3y ago
      I see the chain of reasoning, but it also seems quite logical that quality answers written by real humans should be a pretty big competitive advantage. Throwing away your biggest sales point just because the competition has something new is a business suicide.
      - selcuka 3y ago
        Indeed it is business suicide. I posted this before on another discussion, but this seems to be a common trend [1]: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    You're almost definitely right, but I'm not sure how unbanning AI will stop that trend though?
fabian2k 3y ago
The Open Letter linked in this post is probably a better explanation for most people: https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ The meta post linked here is targeted more towards an internal audience of active users. There are two big parts to this issue, one is that the company is overriding the decisions of the communities and essentially preventing them from moderating AI-authored content entirely. The second one is the way this was done, with no feedback at all, extremely quickly, with vast differences between the public policy and what they told the moderators.
- USB5 3y ago
  Surprisingly brief and well-written letter. I hope they overcome.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  We deeply believe in the core mission of the Stack Exchange network: to provide a repository of high-quality information in the form of questions and answers, and the recent actions taken by Stack Overflow, Inc. are directly harmful to that goal Unfortunately, this seems a naive take; the core mission of the network is to serve the commercial purposes of the business.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    How about a principled and optimistic take? And/Or, the basis under which moderators have been offering their services. We may have been duped by a company's lies, of course. Seems like they've committed a mix of copyright infringement and fraud in that case.
    - mellosouls 3y ago
      Like I said, "unfortunately".
  - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
    That's a very snarky way to put it. It's very well within the rights of the SE community to express their perspective and demand this to be respected. That's not naive. Naive would be assuming this is guaranteed to work. But if they actually implement a moderation strike then SE is going to fall apart sooner than later. So, it's not like they have no leverage.
AlbertCory 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 3y ago
So if I’m understanding, stack allowed moderators to issue 30-day bans without following normal escalation policies, if a moderator had any reason to suspect that a user posted AI-generated content. The new policy is that you have to follow all the normal policies for all the posts, you don’t get to pull out the banhammer just for a suspicion of AI. And the moderators are striking because their want to keep the power to issue uncontestable 30-day bans whenever they feel like it?
- fabian2k 3y ago
  No, the new policy means that in almost all cases you cannot moderate content you consider AI-authored at all. This means moderators cannot delete those posts nor suspend the users for this specific reason. The result is pretty much that AI-generated content is essentially allowed as it cannot be effectively moderated. Even though many sites still have an official policy that disallows it. Disclaimer: I'm a mod on a small SE site, though I have not acted as a mod on any AI-generated content.
  - LewisVerstappen 3y ago
    How do you know if content is AI generated? If mods could decree a piece of content as AI generated (and delete it) willy nilly, then that would be far worse IMO.
    - mwint 3y ago
      As a common example, you see someone who asks a question in the format: “helo plz can help w cod, is broke has error” And then the next day posts four answers in perfect English to four different topics, with that GPT “vibe”. You can’t reliably detect generated content in a vacuum, but Stack Overflow is a very metadata-rich environment for moderators.
      - cja 3y ago
        As a user of SO, etc. I don't care how they wrote the answer. Is it a good answer? Does it help me? That's what I'm interested in. Why censor good answers?
USB5 3y ago
This isn't a strike lol. It's a boycott.
- ctenb 3y ago
  Strike is the right word for workers refusing to work for particular reasons. Boycott pertains to users, not workers.
geitir 3y ago
Honestly stack overflow is just a for profit Wikipedia. It’s content should be scraped and an open source version replace it
- weinzierl 3y ago
  It's so sad to see how a project that once set out to NOT be like the other popular QA sites of that time could still end up so horribly similar. How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this. The way to hell is paved with good intentions, I guess.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    > How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this. Almost any for-profit platform is doomed to become a dumpster, in the end. After Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original founders, sold it to Prosus 2 years ago it has been free falling.
  - ozr 3y ago
    The original founders checked out long before the acquisition, and it's only gotten worse since then. Just the way these things go.
  - arp242 3y ago
    Compared to Experts Exchange or Quora, Stack Exchange is still miles better. You never need to pay to see answers, or register, or have tons of annoying popups, etc.
- chrissoundz 3y ago
  It's data is licensed under creative commons, and last I looked into it, you could easily download the entire stackoverflow dump. There was a torrent and it was about 50GB or something.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  https://github.com/answerdev/answer#readme https://github.com/answerdev/answer#readme is Apache 2 licensed, the sibling comment pointed out that the existing S.O. data is open licensed, but your premise has the same problem every "I'm going to take my ball and go play in the other yard" does: the network effect is very, very real
MrThoughtful 3y ago
Why is anybody moderating on Stack Overflow at all? What is the incentive?
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  To have a useful and functional community for a niche topic. The same reason someone would moderate a forum or sub-Reddit. What's the incentive for dang to moderate HN? If it's garbage and uncurated, people probably won't use it because the filtering tools to parse the data are non-existent. People come for an answer to their question, perhaps they answer the questions of others. Just like how any "community" works. "Their treasure was knowledge."
  - MrThoughtful 3y ago
    Looking at the questions, they seem not very niche to me: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ Just that typical questions about popular technologies. Isn't Dang being paid to moderate HN?
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      They're niche relative to "where else are you going to ask them successfully?". If you go on Twitter, whilst it may have way more people, you're probably not going to reach the same demographics in as meaningful a way. I would assume so, yes, but the point still stands: he needs to moderate it or people won't find value in it, thus he'll be out of a position. What's the value in Wikipedia? The curated knowledge. You only have to go on the average Talk tab for an article on Wikipedia to realize how hard-won most content is, and no, the best outcome doesn't always happen, and plenty of genuine nonsense still makes its way into articles and stays there for years on end.
    - JdeBP 3y ago
      There are 180 other Stack Exchange sites, with subjects ranging from Latin through Woodworking to Biblical Hermeneutics. This is a General Strike.
  - 3y ago
selcuka 3y ago
It makes sense from a business perspective (they have been losing traffic to chatGPT), but unfortunately it may also mean the end of Stack Overflow as we know it. The whole value of SO was to be able to connect with subject experts in a reasonably easy and quick way. Computer generated answers compiled from existing resources may work for simple questions, but not for things that require specific knowledge and experience.
- busterarm 3y ago
  I have not found a reasonably good answer to a question in at least 5 years. Seems more like 10. I still get a better hit rate from mailing lists and github issues.
- starball-tgz 3y ago
  that's not the only value. There's a lot more. Emphasizing on "no-noise" is a big one. Stack Overflow was created to solve the problem of having to dig through long forum threads to get answers, or getting blocked by paywalls. There's also value in searchability and showing up in search engines. Running LLMs like ChatGPT is not cheap in a lot of ways.
- culebron21 3y ago
  I'd doubt SO is the only go-to platform nowadays for modern matters. In 2009-2018 it was the go-to place for all modern technologies. But since then 1) moderation got more severe, so you can't ask a question like "what packages are there for X?" (even though there are many remaining from the early 2010s) 2) many questions similar to older ones but different in fine details, get closed quickly. I see new tech go to their own forums based on Discourse. So, since 2020, I'd still come to SO for answers already available, but for a place to make new questions -- I'd look elsewhere.
coolgoose 3y ago
On one hand I simpatise with the problem, on another Stackoverflow is one of those platforms where the close random hammer for seemingly random reasons was always used.
- sideshowb 3y ago
  Turns out the mods don't like it when told their actions are "too subjective". Irony overflow.
- NohatCoder 3y ago
  In total I think I have gotten more useful answers from closed posts than non-closed ones. Someone at SO have greatly underestimated the value of having a handful of almost identical questions each with their own answers. If anything the network might have lost traffic because moderators have been too efficient in closing duplicate questions before they got useful answers. That said, AI garbage posts do have to be fought with fire.
PeterStuer 3y ago
It's not a black and white issue. Most domain experts already use AI assistants for their daily work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It can and has demonstrated to greatly enhance productivity. The SO problem isn't AI, it's people submitting low value answers, regardless of the way they used to produce those. It is if anything a failiure of their reputation system, both in incentives and in repercussions.
- tptacek 3y ago
  They do? For what, do most domain experts use AI assistants for?
  - dagw 3y ago
    90% of academics I know use chatGPT to help write grant applications or articles. Not for anything related to their actual domain, but more for improving language and clarity.
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    Proofreading, commenting, exploration, investigation, inspiration ... Just because you are an expert does not mean you tackle every mundane but needed part of the work bare fisted or you memorized every edge case.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    I use them every day for generating basic framework of whatever task I am doing, mostly coding. "Write an HTTP request that does this for this xyz test url that takes x y or z as input, create a table with the outputs, sample json attached." etc. It saves me hours working on mundane shit every week.
  - ambrozk 3y ago
    I used it extensively to debug a very thorny MySQL version upgrade. In my experience, it knows a lot about MySQL, and can reason about weird behavior very very effectively. A typical use is asking it something like, "Prior to my MySQL upgrade, my DB integration tests all passed, but now, they're non-deterministically failing with the following error. What could be causing this?" It then proposes hypotheses, which I either accept or push back on with new information. Surprisingly, this process led to it actually debugging a great number of my problems.
celdon25 3y ago
I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I'll step up to help clear the queues.
gorgoiler 3y ago
Given f(prompt, model) -> text is there some h(model, text) -> [0,1) which tells you if the the text was generated by the model? Crucially, could you publish h without publishing the model? It’s a bit like public key cryptography — if generating text is using sign() to sign a prompt with your model then is there a publicly available verify() that verifies the output came from the model but which doesn’t leak the private model itself? What sort of things exist like this (other than private, API models recording all text they’ve generated)?
- jraph 3y ago
  Interesting mathematics problem aside. I think OpenAI sells a subscription to a ChatGPT detector. So you can pay for h. Does it work correctly? I don't know. Selling the poison and the antidote seems like a good business move though (I know, you asked "other than private API" - not sure they record the generated text, not sure they don't). Now, a ChatGPT-generated text (for current versions of ChatGPT) is more or less recognizable so for moderation purpose I would guess you don't really need h, you can smell the bullshit. It has a specific way to be overconfident and it feels like it's giving you a lesson in a specific impersonal way without emotions. Something like this. I have the same kind of feeling when reading a WikiHow page, WikiHow has a very specific and recognizable style to explain things. I guess you can recognize patterns / specific behaviors on accounts posting ChatGPT texts too, which can help for particularly short texts.
- timmaxw 3y ago
  Scott Aaronson has worked on this with OpenAI. Ctrl-F for "watermarking" in https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823. I don't know if they've actually deployed it in ChatGPT or not.
fzeroracer 3y ago
Honestly good on them. We've seen that the rise in ChatGPT spam has led to spamming of repositories with poor quality PRs [1] and this whole AI craze just feels like the SEO disaster hitting mach 10. The quality of content or answers doesn't actually matter, just that it's formatted in a way that seems authoritative. This stuff needed to be purged from the internet yesterday. [1] https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110335983520055904 https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110335983520055904
wcerfgba 3y ago
I don't think criticising AI on grounds of it not 'understanding' is a strong argument, since we have neither a definition for, nor a way to measure, what understanding is.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  I agree that we can't provide a definition of "understanding" that would permit automated classification of answers into "shows understanding" and "shows no understanding". But the best SE answers actually convey real understanding to the reader; they go beyond the brief provided by the question, and explain a subject with conciseness and lucidity. Nobody could mistake such an answer for ChatGPT output. [I have a suspicion that such really good answers may be mostly several years old; I haven't ever thought to try and quantify that]
teekert 3y ago
TL;DR: They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community, and in general want a more open/equal relationship with SO management. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker but I can't really figure out if they are against or for AI answers? They say ChatGPT is s parrot leading to poor quality, so I assume they are against, but Stack Overflow did indeed ban ChatGPT messages? Then they say AI detectors have many false positives, so I guess they are against strong filtering? So what are they for then? This piece needs a tl;dr or bullet list... So yeah I asked our large language friend: Stances from the text: A general moderation strike is being initiated. The strike is in protest of recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform by Stack Exchange, Inc. Striking community members will refrain from moderating and curating content. Critical community-driven anti-spam and quality control infrastructure will be shut down. The new policy on AI-generated content is harmful and overrides community consensus. There has been a serious failure to communicate on the part of Stack Exchange, Inc. AI-generated content poses risks to the integrity of the platform and represents an honesty issue. Stack Exchange, Inc. has ignored the needs and consensus of the community and made decisions without consulting those most affected. The striking users want the AI policy change to be retracted or modified to address concerns and empower moderators. They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community. Clear and open communication from Stack Exchange, Inc. regarding policy changes is demanded. Collaboration with the community instead of fighting it is expected. Stack Exchange, Inc. should be honest about the company's relationship with the community. A change in leadership philosophy toward the community is needed. Leadership should allocate resources based on community needs and involve the community in feature development. Neglecting and mistreating volunteers can lead to a decrease in goodwill and motivation. The concerns laid out in the open letter and the post should be addressed to end the strike. Imho this is the key thing: They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community, and in general want a more open/equal relationship with SO management.
shp0ngle 3y ago
Yeah it makes sense. When I ask something at StackOverflow, I don’t want AI hallucinated sludge as the reply. Or if there is an AI hallucinated sludge, I want it clearly marked as such
dannyw 3y ago
Management and business continue to treat volunteer moderators like their employees or contractors; which even in the some of the better examples in the corporate world, can be mildly abusive as people need to eat and have families to feed. You can't treat volunteers like that. You have to keep them happy. You have to treat them with respect. You're not paying them for their free labour.
- dataengineer56 3y ago
  I hate the unpaid moderator model, it generally attracts only the most terminally-online busybodies, and they seem completely detached from the core aims of SO, instead only interested in metadrama. I don't like it on Reddit and I don't like it on SO. They should pay professional moderators just like Twitter and Facebook.
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    > the core aims of SO Which are?
    - dataengineer56 3y ago
      A place that gives me answers to common coding questions.
      - MauranKilom 3y ago
        If the place is filled to the brim with GPT-generated nonsense, how do you plan on finding those answers?
  - JackFr 3y ago
    I think you've hit on something here. I understand very well that it is active moderation which keeps SO from being a toilet of spam and junk. At the same time, in my limited experience SO moderators are petty tyrants, very jealously guarding their tiny domains.
zoogeny 3y ago
> ChatGPT, for example, doesn’t understand the responses it gives you; it simply associates a given prompt with information it has access to and regurgitates plausible-sounding sentences I don't like this tone, in the sense that suggesting what ChatGPT does is "simply" and "regurgitates" feels like a biased interpretation of what the tech is doing. I think it is fair to say: ChatGPT is very good at creating convincing appearing content that is also incorrect. Validating content that appears high-quality in form but is actually low-quality in content is a major challenge for moderators. Banning suspicious accounts that moderators believe are spamming ChatGPT based responses is easier than individually validating each and every post from such accounts manually. As the number of posts from ChatGPT backed accounts multiplies this would become increasingly difficult and time consuming. I understand their pain and I hope they find a solution. But my gut tells me that whatever solution they come up with will be forced to tolerate some amount of GPT generated content.
rpastuszak 3y ago
> They don’t really understand what they’ve just copied and presented as an answer to a question. > Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a “smart” way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question and answer content. Tricking our bullshit detectors (eg cues present in the text or implied context) is the biggest problem I have with usefulness of AI generated content. I wrote the Medieval Content Farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about) as an excuse to talk about this (and cope), although people focus more on the fact that I present it as a joke.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  I haven't seen an example of that being an issue on stackexchange yet I don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. It doesn't make money. Maybe to get points, but once you're past every point threshold there's no reason to keep doing it, and it happens fairly quick. Accounts don't get sold to advertisers like on reddit. You'd at most do it once, and for the very narrow niche of people who'd want to boost their SE points? Maybe you're shooting for the leaderboard but if that's the case... you'd get noticed, wouldn't you? I could see some kids doing it, if that's the big threat they're facing then it doesn't warrant a blanket ban on LLMs. I care about 1) spam, 2) answer usefulness. Not how the answer was written
slushh 3y ago
>as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value. The strike is not the last last-resort effort. Stack Exchange should not only open source all answers, but also open the platform with ActivityPub. Then, those moderators can create another frontend where they ban the AI users. Otherwise, the moderators will create their own platform without Stack Exchange being the main hub. It's wild that moderator conflicts happen on Stack Exchange and Reddit at the same time.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Stack Overflow/Exchange answers have been 'open source' (creative commons) since day one https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
throw101010 3y ago
I don't think they can win, and I don't mean just the moderators here, SO in general can't win a fight against AI with bans of all kinds. I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post. It should be subject to the same voting system. The error of moderators and SO here is to discard AI generated answers because some wrong (but sounding right) answers it can generate... when often AI answers are also correct and even at times out do what a single human would have found/answered. If you can harness the existing human knowledge and correct the "bad" ones (badly rated AI answer given less weight) to feed the models of the future it seems like a win for everyone in the long run. A ban misses this opportunity and generates even more work for moderators which will inevitably also ban some innocent users and valuable content.
- sofixa 3y ago
  > I don't think they can win, and I don't mean just the moderators here, SO in general can't win a fight against AI with bans of all kinds. > I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post Problem is, most contributors would probably stop contributing (answering questions) if that were the case. If there's an automatic answer that is correct 2/3 of all times, that would mean lots of time spent reviewing automatic answers and lots of time "wasted" (where a contribution isn't needed), which will probably discourage most of them
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    > correct 2/3 of all times You are an optimist
  - casey2 3y ago
    This doesn't track, The OP will vote on the automated answer before the question is public. If it solves his problem then this is a major reduction in low quality question spam, if it doesn't then the AI post is already hidden so it doesn't waste mod time.
red_admiral 3y ago
> They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community [teekert's comment] It wouldn't be that hard from someone to leak it? If all moderators across different sites can see it, it's not exactly a state secret.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  When the complaint is the lack of trustworthiness and of sticking to avowed principles, being untrustworthy and abandoning one's own principles in response is not a wise course of action.
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    No, it just goes to show that trust goes both ways. Trust doesn’t mean that one side can dictate the rules and the other meekly submits. Those weren’t the moderators’ principles anyway, they were imposed on them by corporate.
eterevsky 3y ago
> The problem with AI-generated content It sounds like the author's main problem with AI answers is that they are purely textual, and the AI is unable to verify them. Does it mean that the stance will change if the AI bot is able to run its code before submitting the answer? Aren't there already AI agents available that can do just that?
- charcircuit 3y ago
  The goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of question answer pairs of knowledge. The problem here is that generational AI isn't able to create these new pairs. Either it is regurgitating existing knowledge or it is making up a potential answer. Repeat knowledge in the repository is discouraged and is why questions get marked as duplicate. Making up answers is problematic because it can be hard to verify and it lowers the quality of the repository. An AI being able to run code doesn't mean it is able to verify a solution. Stack Exchange is not about answering people's questions. There can exist a different site for that and for a site like that it could make sense for current LLM to help.
  - eterevsky 3y ago
    > The goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of question answer pairs of knowledge. The problem here is that generational AI isn't able to create these new pairs. I'm not so sure about that. I think we are quite close to an AI being able to put two and two together to create something marginally new. Maybe not an LLM by itself, but with some high-level iterative/recursive process like this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10601.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10601.pdf. What I'm saying is that no-AI policy maybe made sense in late 2022, but will not necessarily hold in late 2023.
culebron21 3y ago
I agree with the statement that AI-generated content is garbage. But having seen moderation on SO turn into gatekeeping in the last ~7 years, I start suspecting this is a case of fight for being gatekeeper. I don't trust the mods that they did conduct anti-AI policy the right way -- I suspect they could overdo it very easily. With no sane ways for users to appeal. Current state of moderation leaves me no desire to contritube to SO -- neither via questions/answers, nor via using moderation tools (I can make edits and review answers or edits of others). Similar situation with moderation took hold in Wikipedia back in the 2000s, when it became only up to them whether a paragraph is "neutral" or "an opinion" and must be deleted (e.g. some pages have pieces saying "it's a common misconception that ___", but in some pages they got deleted with edit comment "it's a POV, must not be in Wikipedia").
throwaway290 3y ago
Kudos and am completely on board with them. Forcing smart people to vet machine-generated content made in a second of poster's time is the ultimate f%^k you to human dignity. And without mods it will be a cesspool in a pinch so hopefully management wakes up ASAP.
alignItems 3y ago
Humans manually posting AI responses is dumb. Stack Overflow should have a built-in AI responder, marked as such, that gives an instant unverified first response, which can then be checked and corrected by human moderators.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  This is not what I want Stack Overflow for, and I think it would discourage higher quality responses from humans. If you want a ChatGPT answer to a question, go ask ChatGPT (directly, or through one of the many more focused frontends people have built for it). But Stack Overflow should encourage answers from real humans.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  I do wonder what would happen if they scrapped karma. The right answers will still get upvoted, but there's no longer any incentive for those seeking internet points.
kurtreed 3y ago
I hope Wikipedia suffers similar fate as well given that they had failed in addressing the Poland Holocaust distortions.
msla 3y ago
I await the people complaining about how they were banned from SO for posting an answer the mods falsely believed was AI-generated.
andersa 3y ago
What's the point of posting AI generated babble on stack overflow without checking it? If I wanted that kind of potentially useful answer I could have just asked ChatGPT myself. But if the user has has the necessary expertise to make sure that what ChatGPT generated is actually correct before posting it, is there really an issue? It would save them some time and allow more questions to be answered.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  Farming Internet points.
  - valine 3y ago
    And? If the answers are getting upvotes then they’re by definition helpful. What’s the problem?
    - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
      If the answers are getting upvotes then they’re in practice merely looking seemingly reasonable to clueless newbies who copy-pasted them. Or they are "funny". This nonsense post received 66 upvotes and 3 downvotes before it was removed 11 days ago: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220410125443/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-operator-in-c-c/65856842#65856842 https://web.archive.org/web/20220410125443/https://stackover...>. Getting an upvote earns you 10 points, getting a downvote loses you 2 points. You need to have earned 15 points to cast an upvote; you need 125 points to cast a downvote, and each one costs you 1 point. Do the math. Upvotes aren’t much more meaningful there than on Hacker News.
      - valine 3y ago
        So your theory is that people go around upvoting posts based solely on them looking somewhat correct? I’ve never upvoted anything that didn’t help me solve a problem. I don’t imagine random upvotes are very common. Also, to your point about humor, in my experience GPTs are very bad at it. If a post is funny it’s most likely not AI generated. Your expectation that all talking meat should maintain a consistently somber decorum while online is, needless to say, unrealistic.
valine 3y ago
I think there’s value in a service that indexes and ranks AI generated responses. If hypothetically stack overflow was 100% AI generated content, it would be acting like a cache for GPT-4. Running GPT-4 is far more expensive than a stack overflow database. Why not pre-generate answers to all common questions so they can be retrieved quickly and cheaply? Future language models are going to provide better quality answers. At some point the line between GPT and expert will get so blurry, enforcing an AI ban will be a fools errand. Sites like SO will still have value as a cache for the most expensive models.
rosmax_1337 3y ago
I hope the moderators depart from SO if they don't get what they want. If they are inclined, they could make their own website to compete with SO.
nottorp 3y ago
This is not about ChatGPT posts ultimately. Its about the new owners of stackoverflow reducing expenses until they run it into the ground
thenerdhead 3y ago
Stack would benefit from this experiment of moderators doing as little as possible. That is overall the ideal moderator to begin with.
engineer_22 3y ago
This is interesting from the perspective of how ChatGPT affects social groups. From the standpoint of business strategy Stack is caught in a bind. Banning bot responses seems like a great idea. Bot responses water down the quality of content, and they risk becoming a library of bot responses. Allowing bot responses also has benefits. The author of post mentions the false-positives on their detection algorithms. A false positive that leads to a ban or other mod action will piss off real users and hurt engagement. Bot responses may not be the same quality as human experience but it may also be a good starting point to drive engagement. Stack's best move may be to be more transparent in HOW they are making decisions and share their metrics for policy success with their users. Radical openness may be the only way for a radically open knowledge sharing platform to survive the bot-war.
sebstefan 3y ago
Say you have an expert in a field who's not stellar at english, someone like me, and I use a large language model to generate a response on a subject I'm an expert in? That's not harmful. I'm not blindly pasting the output to their answer form, my point is still to post a correct answer. I'd obviously double-check. It would be able to produce a better-worded response than my semi-bilingual brain ever could so there is added value there, without even accounting for the time it saves me. I edited this post like 4 times to add an S somewhere or remove one already. Blanket bans on LLMs like the moderators want to do are lazy. The criteria that should matter is whether you answer the question properly or not Then the second point is, on a blind sample of question answers, how well can they tell if something has been generated? I bet it's not stellar. I hope Stack Exchange stays on their position
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  If everyone used LLMs like that, there would be no problem. The thing is, few do, and with the new policy, moderators are not in a position to do anything about it.
  - sebstefan 3y ago
    The thing that I also don't get, is that I haven't seen an example of that being an issue on stackexchange yet I also don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. It doesn't make money. Maybe to get points? But once you're past their thresholds there's no reason to keep doing it, and you get there quick. Accounts don't get sold to advertisers like on reddit. You'd at most do it once. And who would even do that? The very narrow niche of people who'd want to boost their SE points? Maybe you're shooting for the leaderboard but if that's the case... you'd get noticed, wouldn't you? I could see some kids doing it, if that's the big threat they're facing... then they're over-reacting and it still doesn't warrant blanket bans on LLMs
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > I also don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. A tip I learned long ago: Never ask a geek "why?", just nod your head and back away slowly.
jackmott42 3y ago
A general guideline for rule crafting that I have seen been important in sport over and over and over again is: Never disallow something you cannot enforce. Doing so causes people to have to make the choice of losing or being a liar. This is in part how cycling became such a mess, when there was an era where either you do EPO and lie, or retire. Because EPO was not allowed but could not yet be detected.
exabrial 3y ago
Good. I hope it stays this way forever. I’m honestly sick of being told I can’t say “Thank You” at the end of my post or other dumb crap these mods waste my time with.
- iofiiiiiiiii 3y ago
  While some of the SO practices can feel dumb, I wonder what is the tradeoff we are making here? Could it be that for whatever reason (e.g. personality) we might benefit from accepting these "dumb" choices because it also brings with it unrelated benefits? For example, might it be that if they were forced to accept "frivolous" statements such as "thank you" (from the example you gave), might it cause moderators to not moderate, and thereby allow in spam & other nasty bits? It is worth bearing in mind that if we, "good people", complain about moderation, we only see the parts of it that touch our "good posting". There might be plenty of good that moderators are also doing, which only the bad guys see.
- tomstockmail 3y ago
  Between this and the reddit blackout, "volunteer" mods doing free work for a company are really overstating their importance. The cons don't outweigh the goods. It's why I like the Fediverse: I control what I can see on my own instance and don't have a rando telling me what I can and cannot do.
  - gs17 3y ago
    A rando can't deny your freedom to post, but they can deny you interaction with anyone beyond your own instance. Most instances have a pretty long blocklist (albeit sometimes for good reasons).
    - tomstockmail 3y ago
      A single rando can deny your interaction on their instance, not on a bunch of other instances. Shared blocklists notwithstanding, but I would hope if you're following a shared blocklists you're vetting it to an extent.
- 3y ago
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
Moderation is likely something that ChatGPT would be very good at.
guy98238710 3y ago
The underhanded way SE has handled this is a problem, but deleting AI-generated answers is silly. They should instead ask SE Inc. to automatically provide one AI answer for all new questions. Nobody wants to answer the same trivial question a 1000th time. Let AI do that. SE should be for questions that AI is unable to answer. CodeChef gives you an option of AI advice if your submission fails to build. It's very effective at solving beginner problems. SE should do the same. As a positive side effect, it would make spamming with AI-generated answers ineffective and thus save mods time on answers as well.
- mafuy 3y ago
  Clever idea!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sdfghswe 3y ago
Just to be clear - are these moderator people who are unpaid? And if so, is this end-stage capitalism? Surely unpaid workers effectively unionizing because they want to do unpaid work on their own terms must qualify as end-stage capitalism...?
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
All mods are bastards
lolinder 3y ago
Moderating based on "is it AI" never made a lot of sense, and SE is correct to pull the plug on it. It's a similar problem to the (possibly apocryphal) story of the national parks trying to design bear-proof trash cans—"There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." Any anti-AI policy will inevitably catch a bunch of people who just aren't great at English, or are still in high school, or any number of other reasons why their prose might sound stilted. There is no function that can reliably separate the two overlapping probability curves, so trying to do so is pointless. Moderating based on non-constructive comments makes much more sense—if someone posted 30 answers in one hour and none of them answer the question, moderate that. In practice nothing changes, you're still banning people who are abusing AI, but you're doing so based on a concrete quality metric rather than a flawed algorithm plus gut check. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
hanselot 3y ago
The snake eats itself. This data will all be fed right back into GPTX at some point leaving an even worse version of ai to generate future data to ingest again, ad infinitum.
SaintSeiya 3y ago
Good, stay in strike forever, now I can finally post without been harassed by entitled moderators. SO is a toxic forum because of the moderators, not the OP's
spfzero 3y ago
This seems to happen over and over: something that is working fine is changed. Not to make it better, but in hopes of business growth. Half the time it backfires, the other half there are some mostly middling improvements to the business. The odds aren't great, but there are people charged with "growing the business" and so they must change something, even if there's nothing that pops out as a great idea. The community of moderators is kind of a symbiote attached to this enterprise. It gleans and curates and makes the end product more helpful to users. "Helpfulness" is a second-order effect of this moderation, and the whole attraction to the business. After telling moderators to not moderate, moderators should get the message: It's not about AI, its about whether moderation is valuable, and whether helpfulness of answers is valued by the business.
- johnea 3y ago
  This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-( Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users. Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...
stainablesteel 3y ago
its sad to see such hand-crafted communities organize so well only to be ignored by the website they communicate over. and this happens with the stackexchange a lot.. sounds like an excellent time to make an alternative
johnea 3y ago
This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-( Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users. Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...

412 points by mwint 3y ago

What happens when sites like SO become so polluted with AI generated text that the next generation of LLMs trained on the Internet is just AIs being trained on AIs?

ioseph 3y ago
The internet often feels like this already, i.e. if I Google a question the top result will be often be a Quora post
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Using `-site:` will probably make you very happy if you don't already use it and want to get rid of low quality Q&A sites choking your SERPs.
- arketyp 3y ago
  Makes me think culture itself was always already like this.
- dataengineer56 3y ago
  Unrelated to this thread but how does Quora manage to be so bad yet so popular? It's a horrible interface and the answers never seem to be good. Often I'll click a top Google search result and it'll be a Quora "thread" where I can't even see an answer.
  - ioseph 3y ago
    My theory is that it isn't popular, people realise it garbage but they spend a lot on SEO to rank well
LewisVerstappen 3y ago
The intelligence comes from RLHF.
thrtythreeforty 3y ago
I'm willing to bet OpenAI knows how to detect OpenAI output, either via stenographic techniques or via keeping a database of all the text it's generated. Both, probably. Which means future OpenAI models would be getting trained on the output of competitor models. Like Bard. Oof.
aezart 3y ago
Rapid degradation, like recording multiple generations of VHS tapes. The LLMs make the internet dumber, the LLMs get dumber by learning from it. Rinse and repeat.
- valine 3y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. The human brain trains on its own output without descending into chaos. It’s not hard to imagine a scheme where you use a model like GPT-4 to filter a dataset before training. Classification is easier than creation, so you’d expect performance to continue to improve regardless of how poisoned the unfiltered dataset becomes. One of the more exciting scenarios would be if it turns out that performance can improve indefinitely with a generate -> filter -> train cycle. There are certainly parallels to how humans learn.
- kypro 3y ago
  > The LLMs make the internet dumber, the LLMs get dumber by learning from it. I see this said a lot, but in reality it just depends on how the network is trained and how it's prompted. For example, you don't get dumber because you read children's books, you just get better at understanding what makes a good children's book. It's only if reading children's books comes at the cost of reading other content that you might be dumber as a result. Similarly, an AI doesn't automatically get dumber because it encounters dumb content. It's only if you're training exclusively on dumb content that it doesn't know what quality looks like that you'd have problems. Broad training sets (ideally pruned of as much junk as possible) and RLHF in theory should condition the network to reproduce quality content and not simply the lowest common denominator of what's found on the internet. And assuming all that fails there's nothing stopping researchers from just using past datasets with improved architecture going forward. I mean you'd have to wonder why on Earth OpenAI would even release GPT-5 if it's worse than GPT-4... There's just no scenario here in which what you're saying would actually play out in reality. One way or another companies will ensure the next iteration of their LLMs are better than their previous.
  - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    > For example, you don't get dumber because you read children's books, you just get better at understanding what makes a good children's book. I don't think this is an accurate analogy. It's not books for children -- well-written material at a lower educational/cognitive level -- it's more like books by children -- which is necessarily lacking skill and background context (connection to reality). Think about how children constantly pass around misleading, invented, and incorrect stories among themselves -- and they don't do it maliciously, they just don't know any better. Legends like "Candyman"/"Bloody Mary" for example. They need an outside influence, an adult or a book or website, to nudge them out of that knowledge rut. (Of course the same thing can happen with a (closed) group of adults, too, but it's more of a "natural state" with children because they simply haven't had time to encounter as much knowledge.)

enkid 3y ago

How viable is a Wikipedia like approach to StackExchange (and reddit, given the ongoing drama) where a non-profit takes over governance?

guy98238710 3y ago
Proposed as a wiki project: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiask/Introduction https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiask/Introduction It never got anywhere. If it ever does, I would consider being a contributor.

the_shivers 3y ago

I see where the strikers are coming from, but isn't this an intractable problem? There's no way to tell if content is AI generated.

USB5 3y ago
There would be if it were a strike, because the so-called "strikers" would operate the company as employees. This is a boycott, not a strike.
- selcuka 3y ago
  No, boycott means refusing to use a service. This is about refusing to moderate, so it's a strike. Moderators are volunteer workers.
selcuka 3y ago
You can tell it in some cases, especially those that contain typical LLM hallucinations. Many LLM generated answers are either plain wrong, or have made up function or argument names.
- LewisVerstappen 3y ago
  That’s definitely not the case with GPT4
hammyhavoc 3y ago
There's definitely a recognizable default style to a lot of ChatGPT output. Sure, with some prompts you can get away from that, but it's ultimately still following a somewhat predictable pattern. However, as a counterpoint, I now see people who spend a lot of time using ChatGPT actually end up writing in real-time, in-person, like ChatGPT's default vanilla output. Just like some American kids now say "mummy" because of watching so much Peppa Pig.
sampo 3y ago
> There's no way to tell if content is AI generated. In general no. But I don't think anyone human writes in the typical style of a ChatGPT answer, so in practice there is a large class of cases where you can tell.

dataflow 3y ago

I'm confused. What exactly was going so wrong with the temporary AI ban that they felt a near-180-degree turn would be better? I did see the mention of "the rate of inaccuracy experienced by automated detectors aiming to identify AI- and specifically GPT-generated content", but that hardly seems so catastrophic as to suggest the opposite would be better.

selcuka 3y ago
Because they were losing traffic to chatGPT. Stack Overflow has been all about numbers and revenue for some time now.
- dataflow 3y ago
  Oh shoot, thanks for explaining that! When you put it that way, it definitely looks like a threat to the business!
  - NohatCoder 3y ago
    I see the chain of reasoning, but it also seems quite logical that quality answers written by real humans should be a pretty big competitive advantage. Throwing away your biggest sales point just because the competition has something new is a business suicide.
    - selcuka 3y ago
      Indeed it is business suicide. I posted this before on another discussion, but this seems to be a common trend [1]: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- red_admiral 3y ago
  You're almost definitely right, but I'm not sure how unbanning AI will stop that trend though?

fabian2k 3y ago

The Open Letter linked in this post is probably a better explanation for most people: https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ The meta post linked here is targeted more towards an internal audience of active users. There are two big parts to this issue, one is that the company is overriding the decisions of the communities and essentially preventing them from moderating AI-authored content entirely. The second one is the way this was done, with no feedback at all, extremely quickly, with vast differences between the public policy and what they told the moderators.

USB5 3y ago
Surprisingly brief and well-written letter. I hope they overcome.
mellosouls 3y ago
We deeply believe in the core mission of the Stack Exchange network: to provide a repository of high-quality information in the form of questions and answers, and the recent actions taken by Stack Overflow, Inc. are directly harmful to that goal Unfortunately, this seems a naive take; the core mission of the network is to serve the commercial purposes of the business.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  How about a principled and optimistic take? And/Or, the basis under which moderators have been offering their services. We may have been duped by a company's lies, of course. Seems like they've committed a mix of copyright infringement and fraud in that case.
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    Like I said, "unfortunately".
- 2-718-281-828 3y ago
  That's a very snarky way to put it. It's very well within the rights of the SE community to express their perspective and demand this to be respected. That's not naive. Naive would be assuming this is guaranteed to work. But if they actually implement a moderation strike then SE is going to fall apart sooner than later. So, it's not like they have no leverage.

AlbertCory 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

notatoad 3y ago

So if I’m understanding, stack allowed moderators to issue 30-day bans without following normal escalation policies, if a moderator had any reason to suspect that a user posted AI-generated content. The new policy is that you have to follow all the normal policies for all the posts, you don’t get to pull out the banhammer just for a suspicion of AI. And the moderators are striking because their want to keep the power to issue uncontestable 30-day bans whenever they feel like it?

fabian2k 3y ago
No, the new policy means that in almost all cases you cannot moderate content you consider AI-authored at all. This means moderators cannot delete those posts nor suspend the users for this specific reason. The result is pretty much that AI-generated content is essentially allowed as it cannot be effectively moderated. Even though many sites still have an official policy that disallows it. Disclaimer: I'm a mod on a small SE site, though I have not acted as a mod on any AI-generated content.
- LewisVerstappen 3y ago
  How do you know if content is AI generated? If mods could decree a piece of content as AI generated (and delete it) willy nilly, then that would be far worse IMO.
  - mwint 3y ago
    As a common example, you see someone who asks a question in the format: “helo plz can help w cod, is broke has error” And then the next day posts four answers in perfect English to four different topics, with that GPT “vibe”. You can’t reliably detect generated content in a vacuum, but Stack Overflow is a very metadata-rich environment for moderators.
    - cja 3y ago
      As a user of SO, etc. I don't care how they wrote the answer. Is it a good answer? Does it help me? That's what I'm interested in. Why censor good answers?

USB5 3y ago

This isn't a strike lol. It's a boycott.

ctenb 3y ago
Strike is the right word for workers refusing to work for particular reasons. Boycott pertains to users, not workers.

geitir 3y ago

Honestly stack overflow is just a for profit Wikipedia. It’s content should be scraped and an open source version replace it

weinzierl 3y ago
It's so sad to see how a project that once set out to NOT be like the other popular QA sites of that time could still end up so horribly similar. How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this. The way to hell is paved with good intentions, I guess.
- selcuka 3y ago
  > How a group of good people, with best intentions could still end up with a site in a state like this. Almost any for-profit platform is doomed to become a dumpster, in the end. After Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original founders, sold it to Prosus 2 years ago it has been free falling.
- ozr 3y ago
  The original founders checked out long before the acquisition, and it's only gotten worse since then. Just the way these things go.
- arp242 3y ago
  Compared to Experts Exchange or Quora, Stack Exchange is still miles better. You never need to pay to see answers, or register, or have tons of annoying popups, etc.
chrissoundz 3y ago
It's data is licensed under creative commons, and last I looked into it, you could easily download the entire stackoverflow dump. There was a torrent and it was about 50GB or something.
mdaniel 3y ago
https://github.com/answerdev/answer#readme https://github.com/answerdev/answer#readme is Apache 2 licensed, the sibling comment pointed out that the existing S.O. data is open licensed, but your premise has the same problem every "I'm going to take my ball and go play in the other yard" does: the network effect is very, very real

MrThoughtful 3y ago

Why is anybody moderating on Stack Overflow at all? What is the incentive?

hammyhavoc 3y ago
To have a useful and functional community for a niche topic. The same reason someone would moderate a forum or sub-Reddit. What's the incentive for dang to moderate HN? If it's garbage and uncurated, people probably won't use it because the filtering tools to parse the data are non-existent. People come for an answer to their question, perhaps they answer the questions of others. Just like how any "community" works. "Their treasure was knowledge."
- MrThoughtful 3y ago
  Looking at the questions, they seem not very niche to me: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ Just that typical questions about popular technologies. Isn't Dang being paid to moderate HN?
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    They're niche relative to "where else are you going to ask them successfully?". If you go on Twitter, whilst it may have way more people, you're probably not going to reach the same demographics in as meaningful a way. I would assume so, yes, but the point still stands: he needs to moderate it or people won't find value in it, thus he'll be out of a position. What's the value in Wikipedia? The curated knowledge. You only have to go on the average Talk tab for an article on Wikipedia to realize how hard-won most content is, and no, the best outcome doesn't always happen, and plenty of genuine nonsense still makes its way into articles and stays there for years on end.
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    There are 180 other Stack Exchange sites, with subjects ranging from Latin through Woodworking to Biblical Hermeneutics. This is a General Strike.
- 3y ago

selcuka 3y ago

It makes sense from a business perspective (they have been losing traffic to chatGPT), but unfortunately it may also mean the end of Stack Overflow as we know it. The whole value of SO was to be able to connect with subject experts in a reasonably easy and quick way. Computer generated answers compiled from existing resources may work for simple questions, but not for things that require specific knowledge and experience.

busterarm 3y ago
I have not found a reasonably good answer to a question in at least 5 years. Seems more like 10. I still get a better hit rate from mailing lists and github issues.
starball-tgz 3y ago
that's not the only value. There's a lot more. Emphasizing on "no-noise" is a big one. Stack Overflow was created to solve the problem of having to dig through long forum threads to get answers, or getting blocked by paywalls. There's also value in searchability and showing up in search engines. Running LLMs like ChatGPT is not cheap in a lot of ways.
culebron21 3y ago
I'd doubt SO is the only go-to platform nowadays for modern matters. In 2009-2018 it was the go-to place for all modern technologies. But since then 1) moderation got more severe, so you can't ask a question like "what packages are there for X?" (even though there are many remaining from the early 2010s) 2) many questions similar to older ones but different in fine details, get closed quickly. I see new tech go to their own forums based on Discourse. So, since 2020, I'd still come to SO for answers already available, but for a place to make new questions -- I'd look elsewhere.

coolgoose 3y ago

On one hand I simpatise with the problem, on another Stackoverflow is one of those platforms where the close random hammer for seemingly random reasons was always used.

sideshowb 3y ago
Turns out the mods don't like it when told their actions are "too subjective". Irony overflow.
NohatCoder 3y ago
In total I think I have gotten more useful answers from closed posts than non-closed ones. Someone at SO have greatly underestimated the value of having a handful of almost identical questions each with their own answers. If anything the network might have lost traffic because moderators have been too efficient in closing duplicate questions before they got useful answers. That said, AI garbage posts do have to be fought with fire.

PeterStuer 3y ago

It's not a black and white issue. Most domain experts already use AI assistants for their daily work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It can and has demonstrated to greatly enhance productivity. The SO problem isn't AI, it's people submitting low value answers, regardless of the way they used to produce those. It is if anything a failiure of their reputation system, both in incentives and in repercussions.

tptacek 3y ago
They do? For what, do most domain experts use AI assistants for?
- dagw 3y ago
  90% of academics I know use chatGPT to help write grant applications or articles. Not for anything related to their actual domain, but more for improving language and clarity.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Proofreading, commenting, exploration, investigation, inspiration ... Just because you are an expert does not mean you tackle every mundane but needed part of the work bare fisted or you memorized every edge case.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  I use them every day for generating basic framework of whatever task I am doing, mostly coding. "Write an HTTP request that does this for this xyz test url that takes x y or z as input, create a table with the outputs, sample json attached." etc. It saves me hours working on mundane shit every week.
- ambrozk 3y ago
  I used it extensively to debug a very thorny MySQL version upgrade. In my experience, it knows a lot about MySQL, and can reason about weird behavior very very effectively. A typical use is asking it something like, "Prior to my MySQL upgrade, my DB integration tests all passed, but now, they're non-deterministically failing with the following error. What could be causing this?" It then proposes hypotheses, which I either accept or push back on with new information. Surprisingly, this process led to it actually debugging a great number of my problems.

celdon25 3y ago

I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I'll step up to help clear the queues.

gorgoiler 3y ago

Given f(prompt, model) -> text is there some h(model, text) -> [0,1) which tells you if the the text was generated by the model? Crucially, could you publish h without publishing the model? It’s a bit like public key cryptography — if generating text is using sign() to sign a prompt with your model then is there a publicly available verify() that verifies the output came from the model but which doesn’t leak the private model itself? What sort of things exist like this (other than private, API models recording all text they’ve generated)?

jraph 3y ago
Interesting mathematics problem aside. I think OpenAI sells a subscription to a ChatGPT detector. So you can pay for h. Does it work correctly? I don't know. Selling the poison and the antidote seems like a good business move though (I know, you asked "other than private API" - not sure they record the generated text, not sure they don't). Now, a ChatGPT-generated text (for current versions of ChatGPT) is more or less recognizable so for moderation purpose I would guess you don't really need h, you can smell the bullshit. It has a specific way to be overconfident and it feels like it's giving you a lesson in a specific impersonal way without emotions. Something like this. I have the same kind of feeling when reading a WikiHow page, WikiHow has a very specific and recognizable style to explain things. I guess you can recognize patterns / specific behaviors on accounts posting ChatGPT texts too, which can help for particularly short texts.
timmaxw 3y ago
Scott Aaronson has worked on this with OpenAI. Ctrl-F for "watermarking" in https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823. I don't know if they've actually deployed it in ChatGPT or not.

fzeroracer 3y ago

Honestly good on them. We've seen that the rise in ChatGPT spam has led to spamming of repositories with poor quality PRs [1] and this whole AI craze just feels like the SEO disaster hitting mach 10. The quality of content or answers doesn't actually matter, just that it's formatted in a way that seems authoritative. This stuff needed to be purged from the internet yesterday. [1] https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110335983520055904 https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110335983520055904

wcerfgba 3y ago

I don't think criticising AI on grounds of it not 'understanding' is a strong argument, since we have neither a definition for, nor a way to measure, what understanding is.

denton-scratch 3y ago
I agree that we can't provide a definition of "understanding" that would permit automated classification of answers into "shows understanding" and "shows no understanding". But the best SE answers actually convey real understanding to the reader; they go beyond the brief provided by the question, and explain a subject with conciseness and lucidity. Nobody could mistake such an answer for ChatGPT output. [I have a suspicion that such really good answers may be mostly several years old; I haven't ever thought to try and quantify that]

teekert 3y ago

TL;DR: They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community, and in general want a more open/equal relationship with SO management. Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker but I can't really figure out if they are against or for AI answers? They say ChatGPT is s parrot leading to poor quality, so I assume they are against, but Stack Overflow did indeed ban ChatGPT messages? Then they say AI detectors have many false positives, so I guess they are against strong filtering? So what are they for then? This piece needs a tl;dr or bullet list... So yeah I asked our large language friend: Stances from the text: A general moderation strike is being initiated. The strike is in protest of recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform by Stack Exchange, Inc. Striking community members will refrain from moderating and curating content. Critical community-driven anti-spam and quality control infrastructure will be shut down. The new policy on AI-generated content is harmful and overrides community consensus. There has been a serious failure to communicate on the part of Stack Exchange, Inc. AI-generated content poses risks to the integrity of the platform and represents an honesty issue. Stack Exchange, Inc. has ignored the needs and consensus of the community and made decisions without consulting those most affected. The striking users want the AI policy change to be retracted or modified to address concerns and empower moderators. They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community. Clear and open communication from Stack Exchange, Inc. regarding policy changes is demanded. Collaboration with the community instead of fighting it is expected. Stack Exchange, Inc. should be honest about the company's relationship with the community. A change in leadership philosophy toward the community is needed. Leadership should allocate resources based on community needs and involve the community in feature development. Neglecting and mistreating volunteers can lead to a decrease in goodwill and motivation. The concerns laid out in the open letter and the post should be addressed to end the strike. Imho this is the key thing: They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community, and in general want a more open/equal relationship with SO management.

shp0ngle 3y ago

Yeah it makes sense. When I ask something at StackOverflow, I don’t want AI hallucinated sludge as the reply. Or if there is an AI hallucinated sludge, I want it clearly marked as such

dannyw 3y ago

Management and business continue to treat volunteer moderators like their employees or contractors; which even in the some of the better examples in the corporate world, can be mildly abusive as people need to eat and have families to feed. You can't treat volunteers like that. You have to keep them happy. You have to treat them with respect. You're not paying them for their free labour.

dataengineer56 3y ago
I hate the unpaid moderator model, it generally attracts only the most terminally-online busybodies, and they seem completely detached from the core aims of SO, instead only interested in metadrama. I don't like it on Reddit and I don't like it on SO. They should pay professional moderators just like Twitter and Facebook.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  > the core aims of SO Which are?
  - dataengineer56 3y ago
    A place that gives me answers to common coding questions.
    - MauranKilom 3y ago
      If the place is filled to the brim with GPT-generated nonsense, how do you plan on finding those answers?
- JackFr 3y ago
  I think you've hit on something here. I understand very well that it is active moderation which keeps SO from being a toilet of spam and junk. At the same time, in my limited experience SO moderators are petty tyrants, very jealously guarding their tiny domains.

zoogeny 3y ago

> ChatGPT, for example, doesn’t understand the responses it gives you; it simply associates a given prompt with information it has access to and regurgitates plausible-sounding sentences I don't like this tone, in the sense that suggesting what ChatGPT does is "simply" and "regurgitates" feels like a biased interpretation of what the tech is doing. I think it is fair to say: ChatGPT is very good at creating convincing appearing content that is also incorrect. Validating content that appears high-quality in form but is actually low-quality in content is a major challenge for moderators. Banning suspicious accounts that moderators believe are spamming ChatGPT based responses is easier than individually validating each and every post from such accounts manually. As the number of posts from ChatGPT backed accounts multiplies this would become increasingly difficult and time consuming. I understand their pain and I hope they find a solution. But my gut tells me that whatever solution they come up with will be forced to tolerate some amount of GPT generated content.

rpastuszak 3y ago

> They don’t really understand what they’ve just copied and presented as an answer to a question. > Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a “smart” way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question and answer content. Tricking our bullshit detectors (eg cues present in the text or implied context) is the biggest problem I have with usefulness of AI generated content. I wrote the Medieval Content Farm (https://tidings.potato.horse/about https://tidings.potato.horse/about) as an excuse to talk about this (and cope), although people focus more on the fact that I present it as a joke.

sebstefan 3y ago
I haven't seen an example of that being an issue on stackexchange yet I don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. It doesn't make money. Maybe to get points, but once you're past every point threshold there's no reason to keep doing it, and it happens fairly quick. Accounts don't get sold to advertisers like on reddit. You'd at most do it once, and for the very narrow niche of people who'd want to boost their SE points? Maybe you're shooting for the leaderboard but if that's the case... you'd get noticed, wouldn't you? I could see some kids doing it, if that's the big threat they're facing then it doesn't warrant a blanket ban on LLMs. I care about 1) spam, 2) answer usefulness. Not how the answer was written

slushh 3y ago

>as a last-resort effort to protect the Stack Exchange platform and users from a total loss in value. The strike is not the last last-resort effort. Stack Exchange should not only open source all answers, but also open the platform with ActivityPub. Then, those moderators can create another frontend where they ban the AI users. Otherwise, the moderators will create their own platform without Stack Exchange being the main hub. It's wild that moderator conflicts happen on Stack Exchange and Reddit at the same time.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Stack Overflow/Exchange answers have been 'open source' (creative commons) since day one https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

throw101010 3y ago

I don't think they can win, and I don't mean just the moderators here, SO in general can't win a fight against AI with bans of all kinds. I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post. It should be subject to the same voting system. The error of moderators and SO here is to discard AI generated answers because some wrong (but sounding right) answers it can generate... when often AI answers are also correct and even at times out do what a single human would have found/answered. If you can harness the existing human knowledge and correct the "bad" ones (badly rated AI answer given less weight) to feed the models of the future it seems like a win for everyone in the long run. A ban misses this opportunity and generates even more work for moderators which will inevitably also ban some innocent users and valuable content.

sofixa 3y ago
> I don't think they can win, and I don't mean just the moderators here, SO in general can't win a fight against AI with bans of all kinds. > I see one possibility for them, embrace AI and generate a quick/automated first reply by AI marked as such (with a disclaimer) for every post Problem is, most contributors would probably stop contributing (answering questions) if that were the case. If there's an automatic answer that is correct 2/3 of all times, that would mean lots of time spent reviewing automatic answers and lots of time "wasted" (where a contribution isn't needed), which will probably discourage most of them
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  > correct 2/3 of all times You are an optimist
- casey2 3y ago
  This doesn't track, The OP will vote on the automated answer before the question is public. If it solves his problem then this is a major reduction in low quality question spam, if it doesn't then the AI post is already hidden so it doesn't waste mod time.

red_admiral 3y ago

> They want the internal AI policy given to moderators to be revealed to the community [teekert's comment] It wouldn't be that hard from someone to leak it? If all moderators across different sites can see it, it's not exactly a state secret.

JdeBP 3y ago
When the complaint is the lack of trustworthiness and of sticking to avowed principles, being untrustworthy and abandoning one's own principles in response is not a wise course of action.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  No, it just goes to show that trust goes both ways. Trust doesn’t mean that one side can dictate the rules and the other meekly submits. Those weren’t the moderators’ principles anyway, they were imposed on them by corporate.

eterevsky 3y ago

> The problem with AI-generated content It sounds like the author's main problem with AI answers is that they are purely textual, and the AI is unable to verify them. Does it mean that the stance will change if the AI bot is able to run its code before submitting the answer? Aren't there already AI agents available that can do just that?

charcircuit 3y ago
The goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of question answer pairs of knowledge. The problem here is that generational AI isn't able to create these new pairs. Either it is regurgitating existing knowledge or it is making up a potential answer. Repeat knowledge in the repository is discouraged and is why questions get marked as duplicate. Making up answers is problematic because it can be hard to verify and it lowers the quality of the repository. An AI being able to run code doesn't mean it is able to verify a solution. Stack Exchange is not about answering people's questions. There can exist a different site for that and for a site like that it could make sense for current LLM to help.
- eterevsky 3y ago
  > The goal of stack exchange is to create a repository of question answer pairs of knowledge. The problem here is that generational AI isn't able to create these new pairs. I'm not so sure about that. I think we are quite close to an AI being able to put two and two together to create something marginally new. Maybe not an LLM by itself, but with some high-level iterative/recursive process like this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10601.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10601.pdf. What I'm saying is that no-AI policy maybe made sense in late 2022, but will not necessarily hold in late 2023.

culebron21 3y ago

I agree with the statement that AI-generated content is garbage. But having seen moderation on SO turn into gatekeeping in the last ~7 years, I start suspecting this is a case of fight for being gatekeeper. I don't trust the mods that they did conduct anti-AI policy the right way -- I suspect they could overdo it very easily. With no sane ways for users to appeal. Current state of moderation leaves me no desire to contritube to SO -- neither via questions/answers, nor via using moderation tools (I can make edits and review answers or edits of others). Similar situation with moderation took hold in Wikipedia back in the 2000s, when it became only up to them whether a paragraph is "neutral" or "an opinion" and must be deleted (e.g. some pages have pieces saying "it's a common misconception that ___", but in some pages they got deleted with edit comment "it's a POV, must not be in Wikipedia").

throwaway290 3y ago

Kudos and am completely on board with them. Forcing smart people to vet machine-generated content made in a second of poster's time is the ultimate f%^k you to human dignity. And without mods it will be a cesspool in a pinch so hopefully management wakes up ASAP.

alignItems 3y ago

Humans manually posting AI responses is dumb. Stack Overflow should have a built-in AI responder, marked as such, that gives an instant unverified first response, which can then be checked and corrected by human moderators.

madeofpalk 3y ago
This is not what I want Stack Overflow for, and I think it would discourage higher quality responses from humans. If you want a ChatGPT answer to a question, go ask ChatGPT (directly, or through one of the many more focused frontends people have built for it). But Stack Overflow should encourage answers from real humans.
tjpnz 3y ago
I do wonder what would happen if they scrapped karma. The right answers will still get upvoted, but there's no longer any incentive for those seeking internet points.

kurtreed 3y ago

I hope Wikipedia suffers similar fate as well given that they had failed in addressing the Poland Holocaust distortions.

msla 3y ago

I await the people complaining about how they were banned from SO for posting an answer the mods falsely believed was AI-generated.

andersa 3y ago

What's the point of posting AI generated babble on stack overflow without checking it? If I wanted that kind of potentially useful answer I could have just asked ChatGPT myself. But if the user has has the necessary expertise to make sure that what ChatGPT generated is actually correct before posting it, is there really an issue? It would save them some time and allow more questions to be answered.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
Farming Internet points.
- valine 3y ago
  And? If the answers are getting upvotes then they’re by definition helpful. What’s the problem?
  - pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    If the answers are getting upvotes then they’re in practice merely looking seemingly reasonable to clueless newbies who copy-pasted them. Or they are "funny". This nonsense post received 66 upvotes and 3 downvotes before it was removed 11 days ago: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220410125443/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-operator-in-c-c/65856842#65856842 https://web.archive.org/web/20220410125443/https://stackover...>. Getting an upvote earns you 10 points, getting a downvote loses you 2 points. You need to have earned 15 points to cast an upvote; you need 125 points to cast a downvote, and each one costs you 1 point. Do the math. Upvotes aren’t much more meaningful there than on Hacker News.
    - valine 3y ago
      So your theory is that people go around upvoting posts based solely on them looking somewhat correct? I’ve never upvoted anything that didn’t help me solve a problem. I don’t imagine random upvotes are very common. Also, to your point about humor, in my experience GPTs are very bad at it. If a post is funny it’s most likely not AI generated. Your expectation that all talking meat should maintain a consistently somber decorum while online is, needless to say, unrealistic.

valine 3y ago

I think there’s value in a service that indexes and ranks AI generated responses. If hypothetically stack overflow was 100% AI generated content, it would be acting like a cache for GPT-4. Running GPT-4 is far more expensive than a stack overflow database. Why not pre-generate answers to all common questions so they can be retrieved quickly and cheaply? Future language models are going to provide better quality answers. At some point the line between GPT and expert will get so blurry, enforcing an AI ban will be a fools errand. Sites like SO will still have value as a cache for the most expensive models.

rosmax_1337 3y ago

I hope the moderators depart from SO if they don't get what they want. If they are inclined, they could make their own website to compete with SO.

nottorp 3y ago

This is not about ChatGPT posts ultimately. Its about the new owners of stackoverflow reducing expenses until they run it into the ground

thenerdhead 3y ago

Stack would benefit from this experiment of moderators doing as little as possible. That is overall the ideal moderator to begin with.

engineer_22 3y ago

This is interesting from the perspective of how ChatGPT affects social groups. From the standpoint of business strategy Stack is caught in a bind. Banning bot responses seems like a great idea. Bot responses water down the quality of content, and they risk becoming a library of bot responses. Allowing bot responses also has benefits. The author of post mentions the false-positives on their detection algorithms. A false positive that leads to a ban or other mod action will piss off real users and hurt engagement. Bot responses may not be the same quality as human experience but it may also be a good starting point to drive engagement. Stack's best move may be to be more transparent in HOW they are making decisions and share their metrics for policy success with their users. Radical openness may be the only way for a radically open knowledge sharing platform to survive the bot-war.

sebstefan 3y ago

Say you have an expert in a field who's not stellar at english, someone like me, and I use a large language model to generate a response on a subject I'm an expert in? That's not harmful. I'm not blindly pasting the output to their answer form, my point is still to post a correct answer. I'd obviously double-check. It would be able to produce a better-worded response than my semi-bilingual brain ever could so there is added value there, without even accounting for the time it saves me. I edited this post like 4 times to add an S somewhere or remove one already. Blanket bans on LLMs like the moderators want to do are lazy. The criteria that should matter is whether you answer the question properly or not Then the second point is, on a blind sample of question answers, how well can they tell if something has been generated? I bet it's not stellar. I hope Stack Exchange stays on their position

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
If everyone used LLMs like that, there would be no problem. The thing is, few do, and with the new policy, moderators are not in a position to do anything about it.
- sebstefan 3y ago
  The thing that I also don't get, is that I haven't seen an example of that being an issue on stackexchange yet I also don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. It doesn't make money. Maybe to get points? But once you're past their thresholds there's no reason to keep doing it, and you get there quick. Accounts don't get sold to advertisers like on reddit. You'd at most do it once. And who would even do that? The very narrow niche of people who'd want to boost their SE points? Maybe you're shooting for the leaderboard but if that's the case... you'd get noticed, wouldn't you? I could see some kids doing it, if that's the big threat they're facing... then they're over-reacting and it still doesn't warrant blanket bans on LLMs
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > I also don't see the end goal making a bot that answers questions on SE. A tip I learned long ago: Never ask a geek "why?", just nod your head and back away slowly.

jackmott42 3y ago

A general guideline for rule crafting that I have seen been important in sport over and over and over again is: Never disallow something you cannot enforce. Doing so causes people to have to make the choice of losing or being a liar. This is in part how cycling became such a mess, when there was an era where either you do EPO and lie, or retire. Because EPO was not allowed but could not yet be detected.

exabrial 3y ago

Good. I hope it stays this way forever. I’m honestly sick of being told I can’t say “Thank You” at the end of my post or other dumb crap these mods waste my time with.

iofiiiiiiiii 3y ago
While some of the SO practices can feel dumb, I wonder what is the tradeoff we are making here? Could it be that for whatever reason (e.g. personality) we might benefit from accepting these "dumb" choices because it also brings with it unrelated benefits? For example, might it be that if they were forced to accept "frivolous" statements such as "thank you" (from the example you gave), might it cause moderators to not moderate, and thereby allow in spam & other nasty bits? It is worth bearing in mind that if we, "good people", complain about moderation, we only see the parts of it that touch our "good posting". There might be plenty of good that moderators are also doing, which only the bad guys see.
tomstockmail 3y ago
Between this and the reddit blackout, "volunteer" mods doing free work for a company are really overstating their importance. The cons don't outweigh the goods. It's why I like the Fediverse: I control what I can see on my own instance and don't have a rando telling me what I can and cannot do.
- gs17 3y ago
  A rando can't deny your freedom to post, but they can deny you interaction with anyone beyond your own instance. Most instances have a pretty long blocklist (albeit sometimes for good reasons).
  - tomstockmail 3y ago
    A single rando can deny your interaction on their instance, not on a bunch of other instances. Shared blocklists notwithstanding, but I would hope if you're following a shared blocklists you're vetting it to an extent.
3y ago

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

Moderation is likely something that ChatGPT would be very good at.

guy98238710 3y ago

The underhanded way SE has handled this is a problem, but deleting AI-generated answers is silly. They should instead ask SE Inc. to automatically provide one AI answer for all new questions. Nobody wants to answer the same trivial question a 1000th time. Let AI do that. SE should be for questions that AI is unable to answer. CodeChef gives you an option of AI advice if your submission fails to build. It's very effective at solving beginner problems. SE should do the same. As a positive side effect, it would make spamming with AI-generated answers ineffective and thus save mods time on answers as well.

mafuy 3y ago
Clever idea!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sdfghswe 3y ago

Just to be clear - are these moderator people who are unpaid? And if so, is this end-stage capitalism? Surely unpaid workers effectively unionizing because they want to do unpaid work on their own terms must qualify as end-stage capitalism...?

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

All mods are bastards

lolinder 3y ago

Moderating based on "is it AI" never made a lot of sense, and SE is correct to pull the plug on it. It's a similar problem to the (possibly apocryphal) story of the national parks trying to design bear-proof trash cans—"There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." Any anti-AI policy will inevitably catch a bunch of people who just aren't great at English, or are still in high school, or any number of other reasons why their prose might sound stilted. There is no function that can reliably separate the two overlapping probability curves, so trying to do so is pointless. Moderating based on non-constructive comments makes much more sense—if someone posted 30 answers in one hour and none of them answer the question, moderate that. In practice nothing changes, you're still banning people who are abusing AI, but you're doing so based on a concrete quality metric rather than a flawed algorithm plus gut check. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

hanselot 3y ago

The snake eats itself. This data will all be fed right back into GPTX at some point leaving an even worse version of ai to generate future data to ingest again, ad infinitum.

SaintSeiya 3y ago

Good, stay in strike forever, now I can finally post without been harassed by entitled moderators. SO is a toxic forum because of the moderators, not the OP's

spfzero 3y ago

This seems to happen over and over: something that is working fine is changed. Not to make it better, but in hopes of business growth. Half the time it backfires, the other half there are some mostly middling improvements to the business. The odds aren't great, but there are people charged with "growing the business" and so they must change something, even if there's nothing that pops out as a great idea. The community of moderators is kind of a symbiote attached to this enterprise. It gleans and curates and makes the end product more helpful to users. "Helpfulness" is a second-order effect of this moderation, and the whole attraction to the business. After telling moderators to not moderate, moderators should get the message: It's not about AI, its about whether moderation is valuable, and whether helpfulness of answers is valued by the business.

johnea 3y ago
This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-( Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users. Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...

stainablesteel 3y ago

its sad to see such hand-crafted communities organize so well only to be ignored by the website they communicate over. and this happens with the stackexchange a lot.. sounds like an excellent time to make an alternative

johnea 3y ago

This is just the most recent decline in stackoverflow 8-( Ever since the posting system was turned into a social score where people are mostly conncerned with increassing their score versus answering questions, stackoverflow has failed it's users. Just another example in the very long list of for-profit plaforms doing what's best for profit over what's best for the users...