5 ms·

The Open Letter linked in this post is probably a better explanation for most people: https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ The me

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.
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    Its not at all "snarky". Expecting a business - with infamous episodes of contempt towards moderators - to behave in the idealistic way presented here is naïve. Might it submit to pressure? Perhaps. But the wording of this letter in its presumption of the motives of a private organisation misunderstands the reality of the commercial world.
    - pydry 3y ago
      They're not just expecting the business to behave this way they are attempting to force its hand. Are you familiar with strike tactics?
      - mellosouls 3y ago
        Of course, but strikers are paid workers operating within a legal process, they can't just be easily supplanted by free alternatives as can moderators. But that's getting off the topic of whether or not the wording of the quoted paragraph reflects reality.
        pydry 3y ago
        >strikers are paid workers Not in this case. The exchange is real but non-monetary. >But that's getting off the topic No, not really.
        2-718-281-828 3y ago
        > But that's getting off the topic of whether or not the wording of the quoted paragraph reflects reality. not off-topic at all - but I think you just noticed that your argument doesn't hold.
- leroman 3y ago
  I think this is a naive (or cynical?) take on a business, its also their goal to hire and retain both employees and customers. If the latter is done based on a lie, then you cant align your “commercial purpose” and people who fulfill it..
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    Unfortunately (again), there are plenty of people who will buy from and work for businesses that don't subscribe to the same views as those in the letter.
- lozenge 3y ago
  How does allowing AI content inherently and unquestioningly serve the commercial purposes of the business?
  - mellosouls 3y ago
    Well this is off the topic of the quoted passage in my comment, but your use of "unquestioningly" - is a strange choice of word, and reflected elsewhere in the letter in "unchecked". I found that quite a dubious wording as well. That's exactly what moderation is for, checking, questioning, etc, its not an argument against AI-generated content. There seems to be an emotional reaction, but people will still value the highest quality content, whatever its provenance. If the argument is that the workload will be too high, well make that argument - don't sidetrack with misleading and idealistic appeals to emotion.
- layer8 3y ago
  Business viability should be a means to realize the core mission, not the other way around.
- danaris 3y ago
  To the extent that this is true, it's a corruption of the purpose of companies in our society. The reason we created "corporations" as a concept was not simply to have a vehicle to make as much money as possible, any way possible. It was to serve society by providing services and making products, which would then be sold, and, if they were good enough, would make the company a profit. This idea that no business should ever be expected to do anything but what makes them the most money the fastest is toxic and is ruining our economy and our society.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Well then maybe "the business" shouldn't depend on the gratis effort of hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. If I read between the lines, it would seem to me that management has decided they can make more money by allowing AI-generated content. I don't think this is true. Yet. But whether it is or isn't, this is a revocation of the implied contract we, the users, have had with the site.
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  The core mission for the c-suite executives and owners is commercial. But they neither build nor use the thing. They're just in charge. Workers taking back some of that control is a great thing.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  The core mission of the system that is stack overflow is in the eye of the beholder. If you ask a army of unpaid volunteers who maintain it or one of the even larger army of contributors who actually provide expert level content for free, I think you'll be a different answer than the C-suite will give you. The business is a helpful abstraction layered over the top of all these people doing the actual work. It's useful as long as it keeps the lights on. When it stops doing that the community has the right and the responsibility to move the work product of the huge quantity of people actually doing the thing here somewhere else.
nailer 3y ago
Sadly it doesn’t have a link for it’s principal assertion: > Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content That would have been a really good place for [one of these](https://somewhere https://somewhere)
- fabian2k 3y ago
  The problem is that the public policy as posted by SE is simply different than the private communication from SE. Those private rules were shared in places that have an expectation of confidentiality, so the moderators are not entirely free to just post those without violating that expectation. The public policy by SE is misleading, it makes the rule appear a lot different than it actually is. I am a mod on a small SE site, so I have seen the internal communication and it does essentially prohibit moderating AI-generated posts except in some very narrow circumstances.
lolinder 3y ago
The manner in which they rolled it out is a very real concern, but moderating based on how the moderators think you wrote the content is a dangerous policy that is ripe for abuse, and SE has a history of overly aggressive moderators. I don't blame SE for wanting to nip it in the bud. If a post isn't constructive, they can and should moderate it away, whether or not it was AI generated. If they want to have a rate limit on number of answers per day, they can do that. But they need to moderate based on observable metrics, not guesses at what's happening behind the scenes.
- aetherson 3y ago
  Also, trying to hold back the tide on AI is dumb and doomed to fail. People need to find some way to exist along with these tools. The editors at Stack Exchange are not the kind of powerful cabal that is going to roll back the last three years of computer advances.
  - treve 3y ago
    An excellent use-case of AI with Stack Overflow would be to integrate it and use existing questions and answers to help people solve problems. A terrible use would be to feed the answers back into the system, because it reduces both the value humans and eventually AI bring. As a person that looks at stackoverflow answers, it's also awful to see the long-winded AI answers. If there's mistakes in the answers, there's no way to get the submitter to make changes because they likely didn't understand it in the first place. There's ways to do it correctly, but inexperienced developers opening chatgpt and blindly copying answers to harvest karma isn't it.
  - ggorlen 3y ago
    Regardless of whether it's doomed to fail, the content these "computer advances" are creating on the site is definitely garbage at the present time. I've flagged hundreds of posts, mostly brand-new users attempting to rep farm. A huge percentage of the answers are flat-out incorrect or have little to do with the question. Banning all moderation without consulting the community is not a step towards coexistence, it's a step towards turning the site into a dumping ground for stale LLM spew in the name of engagement. Companies like Stack Overflow seem to care less about the quality and accuracy of the site's content as long as the engagement numbers look good. Unfortunately, a lot of users don't seem to care about quality, either, which is how we've wound up with the current state of affairs where just about every social platform is increasingly flooded with bot spam, misinformation, scams and junk. By banning low-quality posts, including unverified LLM answers, the site can secure a future for itself as a bastion of quality. Or it can turn its back on the experts that built the content that's used to train the LLMs and hope that LLM quality improves enough that expert humans aren't necessary. Even if that gamble works out for them and LLMs do mostly replace humans as some commenters optimistically seem to expect, then there'll still be no need for Stack Overflow, as one can simply ask an LLM directly. That's why effectively dumping human experts for LLMs seems like a failed business model either way. The best approach to move forward seems to be to carve out a space that provides unique value that LLMs can't and ride that until LLMs make significant advances. Disclosure/context: I'm a daily SO answerer on strike, among the top ~4k users by rep overall. I'm pretty sure most folks who are dismissing the problem don't monitor tag feeds or curate queues enough to see the flood of blatantly wrong LLM answers spamming in from new accounts.

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.
- mellosouls 3y ago
  Its not at all "snarky". Expecting a business - with infamous episodes of contempt towards moderators - to behave in the idealistic way presented here is naïve. Might it submit to pressure? Perhaps. But the wording of this letter in its presumption of the motives of a private organisation misunderstands the reality of the commercial world.
  - pydry 3y ago
    They're not just expecting the business to behave this way they are attempting to force its hand. Are you familiar with strike tactics?
    - mellosouls 3y ago
      Of course, but strikers are paid workers operating within a legal process, they can't just be easily supplanted by free alternatives as can moderators. But that's getting off the topic of whether or not the wording of the quoted paragraph reflects reality.
      - pydry 3y ago
        >strikers are paid workers Not in this case. The exchange is real but non-monetary. >But that's getting off the topic No, not really.
      - 2-718-281-828 3y ago
        > But that's getting off the topic of whether or not the wording of the quoted paragraph reflects reality. not off-topic at all - but I think you just noticed that your argument doesn't hold.
leroman 3y ago
I think this is a naive (or cynical?) take on a business, its also their goal to hire and retain both employees and customers. If the latter is done based on a lie, then you cant align your “commercial purpose” and people who fulfill it..
- mellosouls 3y ago
  Unfortunately (again), there are plenty of people who will buy from and work for businesses that don't subscribe to the same views as those in the letter.
lozenge 3y ago
How does allowing AI content inherently and unquestioningly serve the commercial purposes of the business?
- mellosouls 3y ago
  Well this is off the topic of the quoted passage in my comment, but your use of "unquestioningly" - is a strange choice of word, and reflected elsewhere in the letter in "unchecked". I found that quite a dubious wording as well. That's exactly what moderation is for, checking, questioning, etc, its not an argument against AI-generated content. There seems to be an emotional reaction, but people will still value the highest quality content, whatever its provenance. If the argument is that the workload will be too high, well make that argument - don't sidetrack with misleading and idealistic appeals to emotion.
layer8 3y ago
Business viability should be a means to realize the core mission, not the other way around.
danaris 3y ago
To the extent that this is true, it's a corruption of the purpose of companies in our society. The reason we created "corporations" as a concept was not simply to have a vehicle to make as much money as possible, any way possible. It was to serve society by providing services and making products, which would then be sold, and, if they were good enough, would make the company a profit. This idea that no business should ever be expected to do anything but what makes them the most money the fastest is toxic and is ruining our economy and our society.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
Well then maybe "the business" shouldn't depend on the gratis effort of hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. If I read between the lines, it would seem to me that management has decided they can make more money by allowing AI-generated content. I don't think this is true. Yet. But whether it is or isn't, this is a revocation of the implied contract we, the users, have had with the site.
UtopiaPunk 3y ago
The core mission for the c-suite executives and owners is commercial. But they neither build nor use the thing. They're just in charge. Workers taking back some of that control is a great thing.
idiotsecant 3y ago
The core mission of the system that is stack overflow is in the eye of the beholder. If you ask a army of unpaid volunteers who maintain it or one of the even larger army of contributors who actually provide expert level content for free, I think you'll be a different answer than the C-suite will give you. The business is a helpful abstraction layered over the top of all these people doing the actual work. It's useful as long as it keeps the lights on. When it stops doing that the community has the right and the responsibility to move the work product of the huge quantity of people actually doing the thing here somewhere else.

nailer 3y ago

Sadly it doesn’t have a link for it’s principal assertion: > Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content That would have been a really good place for [one of these](https://somewhere https://somewhere)

fabian2k 3y ago
The problem is that the public policy as posted by SE is simply different than the private communication from SE. Those private rules were shared in places that have an expectation of confidentiality, so the moderators are not entirely free to just post those without violating that expectation. The public policy by SE is misleading, it makes the rule appear a lot different than it actually is. I am a mod on a small SE site, so I have seen the internal communication and it does essentially prohibit moderating AI-generated posts except in some very narrow circumstances.

lolinder 3y ago

The manner in which they rolled it out is a very real concern, but moderating based on how the moderators think you wrote the content is a dangerous policy that is ripe for abuse, and SE has a history of overly aggressive moderators. I don't blame SE for wanting to nip it in the bud. If a post isn't constructive, they can and should moderate it away, whether or not it was AI generated. If they want to have a rate limit on number of answers per day, they can do that. But they need to moderate based on observable metrics, not guesses at what's happening behind the scenes.

aetherson 3y ago
Also, trying to hold back the tide on AI is dumb and doomed to fail. People need to find some way to exist along with these tools. The editors at Stack Exchange are not the kind of powerful cabal that is going to roll back the last three years of computer advances.
- treve 3y ago
  An excellent use-case of AI with Stack Overflow would be to integrate it and use existing questions and answers to help people solve problems. A terrible use would be to feed the answers back into the system, because it reduces both the value humans and eventually AI bring. As a person that looks at stackoverflow answers, it's also awful to see the long-winded AI answers. If there's mistakes in the answers, there's no way to get the submitter to make changes because they likely didn't understand it in the first place. There's ways to do it correctly, but inexperienced developers opening chatgpt and blindly copying answers to harvest karma isn't it.
- ggorlen 3y ago
  Regardless of whether it's doomed to fail, the content these "computer advances" are creating on the site is definitely garbage at the present time. I've flagged hundreds of posts, mostly brand-new users attempting to rep farm. A huge percentage of the answers are flat-out incorrect or have little to do with the question. Banning all moderation without consulting the community is not a step towards coexistence, it's a step towards turning the site into a dumping ground for stale LLM spew in the name of engagement. Companies like Stack Overflow seem to care less about the quality and accuracy of the site's content as long as the engagement numbers look good. Unfortunately, a lot of users don't seem to care about quality, either, which is how we've wound up with the current state of affairs where just about every social platform is increasingly flooded with bot spam, misinformation, scams and junk. By banning low-quality posts, including unverified LLM answers, the site can secure a future for itself as a bastion of quality. Or it can turn its back on the experts that built the content that's used to train the LLMs and hope that LLM quality improves enough that expert humans aren't necessary. Even if that gamble works out for them and LLMs do mostly replace humans as some commenters optimistically seem to expect, then there'll still be no need for Stack Overflow, as one can simply ask an LLM directly. That's why effectively dumping human experts for LLMs seems like a failed business model either way. The best approach to move forward seems to be to carve out a space that provides unique value that LLMs can't and ride that until LLMs make significant advances. Disclosure/context: I'm a daily SO answerer on strike, among the top ~4k users by rep overall. I'm pretty sure most folks who are dismissing the problem don't monitor tag feeds or curate queues enough to see the flood of blatantly wrong LLM answers spamming in from new accounts.