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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 Exchan

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.

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.