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Consider as an analogy, safety while driving. Driving dangerously is fairly uniformly proscribed, but we also have specific prohibitions on various mechanisms

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?

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?