3 ms·

probably, or is? The offence here is spamming, AI is orthogonal. Users spamming should be given a timeout.

Eisenstein 3y ago
> The offence here is spamming, AI is orthogonal. You can make broad classifications for an act (it wasn't murder, it was negligent discharge of a firearm), but that doesn't preclude the fact that it is also something else (shooting in the direction of a person without regard to their life and killing them is murder).
- omegabravo 3y ago
  Your analogy isn't a great fit, because the distinction between the two carries different penalties. In this scenario, spamming with or without AI would carry the same penalty. The benefit is that you don't need to determine if AI was involved, since it doesn't matter.
andrewaylett 3y ago
Consider as an analogy, safety while driving. Driving dangerously is fairly uniformly proscribed, but we also have specific prohibitions on various mechanisms by which people drive dangerously. It's much easier to prove that someone was intoxicated or using a mobile phone, rather than needing to show in each case that the intoxication was dangerous or that the mobile phone use was distracting and the distraction was dangerous. Similarly, use of LLMs to generate and post large quantities of text from a short prompt is inherently spamming. The user could provide exactly the same value by posting their prompt. If the prompt isn't valuable, the output won't be either, as anyone with a copy of the prompt could generate equivalent output for themselves if they wished to.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  As an addendum, to not (I hope) distract from the point about spam -- I don't at all object to using an LLM for inspiration, or editing, or summarisation. So long as there's no claim that the output contains more information than the input. Any statement of fact in the output should be present in the prompt or validated by a human before publishing, or it's suspect. And if it's published without disclosing the lack of validation, it's unethical.
  - shagie 3y ago
    > And if it's published without disclosing the lack of validation, it's unethical. How is this different than people posting things that they didn't test themselves? try {code block} Hope this helps Answers that are clearly not an answer are edited to be pretty rather than down voted and flagged because they're wrong ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/76402243 https://stackoverflow.com/a/76402243 ). The problem isn't an LLM (though that just provides more scale) - its that incorrect information isn't removable / actionable on SO. If the person tried to answer a question it remains up.
    - andrewaylett 3y ago
      Who says it's not different?

> The offence here is spamming, AI is orthogonal. You can make broad classifications for an act (it wasn't murder, it was negligent discharge of a firearm), but that doesn't preclude the fact that it is also something else (shooting in the direction of a person without regard to their life and killing them is murder).

omegabravo 3y ago
Your analogy isn't a great fit, because the distinction between the two carries different penalties. In this scenario, spamming with or without AI would carry the same penalty. The benefit is that you don't need to determine if AI was involved, since it doesn't matter.

andrewaylett 3y ago

Consider as an analogy, safety while driving. Driving dangerously is fairly uniformly proscribed, but we also have specific prohibitions on various mechanisms by which people drive dangerously. It's much easier to prove that someone was intoxicated or using a mobile phone, rather than needing to show in each case that the intoxication was dangerous or that the mobile phone use was distracting and the distraction was dangerous. Similarly, use of LLMs to generate and post large quantities of text from a short prompt is inherently spamming. The user could provide exactly the same value by posting their prompt. If the prompt isn't valuable, the output won't be either, as anyone with a copy of the prompt could generate equivalent output for themselves if they wished to.

andrewaylett 3y ago
As an addendum, to not (I hope) distract from the point about spam -- I don't at all object to using an LLM for inspiration, or editing, or summarisation. So long as there's no claim that the output contains more information than the input. Any statement of fact in the output should be present in the prompt or validated by a human before publishing, or it's suspect. And if it's published without disclosing the lack of validation, it's unethical.
- shagie 3y ago
  > And if it's published without disclosing the lack of validation, it's unethical. How is this different than people posting things that they didn't test themselves? try {code block} Hope this helps Answers that are clearly not an answer are edited to be pretty rather than down voted and flagged because they're wrong ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/76402243 https://stackoverflow.com/a/76402243 ). The problem isn't an LLM (though that just provides more scale) - its that incorrect information isn't removable / actionable on SO. If the person tried to answer a question it remains up.
  - andrewaylett 3y ago
    Who says it's not different?