11 ms·

Stackoverflow is investing into baking GenAI

87 points by rounakdatta 3y ago

symbolicAGI 3y ago
The Stackoverflow research initiatives per generative AI are very good examples of what some enterprises can do to improve user-input text context on websites and applications. 1. Adapt user text to a standard format. 2. Correct spelling and grammar mistakes. 3. Detect inconsistencies during the input process.
skilled 3y ago
And before long it's going to be, "Let AI write an answer to a question and you only need to edit it!".
- agilob 3y ago
  Do I need to ask the question or can I automate that too?
  - Y_Y 3y ago
    If you have to ask...
  - easyThrowaway 3y ago
    As someone already said in another thread somewhere, we should cut to the chase already and let ChatGPT click the ads on the page. Even better, we can further optimize the experience by simplifying all news websites, reddit, SO networks to just a few empty HTML pages with ads so the can be clicked by the AI. No need for content, agencies, editorial staff. I mean, sure, Facebook, Microsoft and Google would probably say that's against the TOS of their ad services, but after all it's not like they cared about TOSes when they used the same websites to train their models.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      You might be interested in AdNauseam: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's a uBlock Origin fork that behaves as described.
      - reportgunner 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure the parent was sarcastic about clicking the ads.
- graypegg 3y ago
  I mean, that would be the “next step” wouldn’t it? I’m less scared for the big stack exchange communities which have enough people to vote out junk, but for the little ones I’m not sure.
- dataengineer56 3y ago
  I'd rather it helped people to write coherent questions rather than the usual dumping of a few irrelevant lines of logs onto the page and asking "please help".
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  > Dear members of the Stack Overflow community, I hope this question finds you well. > I am a novice in the world of JavaScript and, as part of my learning journey, I've undertaken the task of attempting to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM). Specifically, my aim is to add a new div element dynamically to my webpage, utilizing the common programming language called JavaScript. > This snippet of code is my current attempt: var newDiv = document.createElement("div"); newDiv.id = "newDiv"; newDiv.innerHTML = "This is a new div."; document.body.appendChild(newDiv); > The logic behind the above code snippet is as follows: > - I create a new div element by invoking document.createElement("div") and assign it to the variable newDiv. > - I then assign an id to the newly created div by setting newDiv.id to "newDiv". > - To add content to the div, I set newDiv.innerHTML to "This is a new div." > - Lastly, I attempt to append the new div to the body of the document using document.body.appendChild(newDiv). > Nevertheless, the code does not seem to produce the "div" I was hoping for. Additionally, there are no errors displayed on the console. I have attempted to diagnose the issue myself but have failed, and I have exhausted all other online resources > Time is of the essence. Additionally, I would prefer this answer to be as concise and easy to understand as possible. Your guidance and assistance in this matter is very much appreciated. > Thanks in advance, > user4798145768
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    [closed]: needs details or clarity 0 comments
malfist 3y ago
Whatever happened with the moderator strike over the AI? This seems like a great way to cheapen the brand.
- mwint 3y ago
  Still ongoing.
csjh 3y ago
Duplicate question closing will now be instant if your question has an embedding that's remotely close to another question
- ethbr0 3y ago
  It really is obscene how many useful answers I've found on threads that were subsequently closed as duplicate -- with a link to a question that's not even close to the same.
  - coffeeshopgoth 3y ago
    I was going to post this response, too. Yes, you can close it because it is duplicate, but god knows the huge range of how good people are at explaining something to people of various levels of understanding.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      After reviewing a few meta posts on it, much appears to boil down to there being poor SO UX options. I.e. there isn't a "closed for being homework" category Consequently, duplicate served as the go-to but inappropriate "there's something wrong with this, and I don't want to deal with it" button.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Can you provide a link to an example or two of that happening?
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      As near as I can tell, SO prunes duplicate-tagged questions. I 404d on the first few examples I pulled.
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        Users with 10k reputation will be able to see them even though they're deleted. Can you post them anyway?
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
SO could go on all in using the 100k context length of Anthropic Claude, feed in the documentation of a library or product, and have it generate questions and answers, and post them on Stack Overflow to fake activity now that everyone I know participates on it in a read-only fashion.
madsbuch 3y ago
As writing, all comments seems to be quite negative. I think this is awesome and definitely something that can unlock a lot for me. I problem I often encounter when using stack overflow is that questions are answered ina a very narrow way that doesn't really fit me. So I need to bounce between 3-4 answers that are related to get the right solution. I would guess this solution could do this for me, provided that I provide anough context is my problem prompt.
nomilk 3y ago
The projects listed [1] seem a bit mundane at first, but I prefer that to the opposite, where companies shoehorn GPT into places where it just irritates users. [1] Title generation, Formatting assistant, Sentiment analysis, Identifying duplicate questions
stabbles 3y ago
In a way SO is the perfect platform for human feedback in reinforcement learning
- nomilk 3y ago
  True, feedback on stack overflow can be brutally thorough and exacting to an extreme that the general population (or a mechanical turk) would struggle to emulate; perfect feedback for a LLM.
OldManRyan 3y ago
Me: Hey AI how do I do this using X? AI: Why would you ever want to do that using X? You should do Y. Me: Well I need to do it using X because of these reasons. AI: ...That's dumb. You should just do Y.
- nolok 3y ago
  Use jquery
- brycewray 3y ago
  That AI is definitely trained on past SO content.
- sideshowb 3y ago
  Closed as duplicate of "how do I do that using X" even though on close inspection that!=this
- falcor84 3y ago
  That actually sounds amazing - I would love to see the AI express opinions that contradict mine - all that I'm getting is "I apologize for the confusion. You're right ..." If it was actually capable of having these kinds of conversations, it would be on its way to solving the XY Problem [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
ulrikhansen54 3y ago
Their traffic is rumoured to be down 25-30% after ChatGPT was released, so good to see that they are doing something to keep the community alive in the new era of GenAI.
- nolok 3y ago
  I don't know about ChatGPT, but for me Phind [1] really lowered my SO usage [1] https://www.phind.com/ https://www.phind.com/
  - 6DM 3y ago
    I've tried Phind a few times, but my gripe with it, so far, is it gives me outdated examples that don't work because the API has changed. Is there some magic keywords I should be including to prevent that?
    - nolok 3y ago
      Not sure about that, it's been mostly good for me in the case I needed it
      - 6DM 3y ago
        Maybe my use case of dotnet core development is going to be different than for python devs.
    - rounakdatta 3y ago
      Make sure that you're logged in, and have turned on the GPT-4 toggle?
      - 6DM 3y ago
        I assume that by GPT-4, you're talking about the "Use Best Model" toggle right?
  - chx 3y ago
ryandrake 3y ago
I feel like GenAI has become the next "blockchain". Wall Street (or someone else!) is setting some weird expectation for every company to somehow say "we're doing something with GenAI." Doesn't matter what it is they're doing with it, they just have to say the magic word in a press release or blog post. Apparently, "we're using AI" is a better story than "we're making great products, regardless of the underlying tech."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ladberg 3y ago
  In my opinion it's significantly more meaningful than blockchain hype. Blockchain doesn't add any value whatsoever for 99% of the use-cases that companies were advertising it for, but AI can immediately and cheaply create output that previously would have been expensive, time-consuming, or impossible.
  - dandellion 3y ago
    To me it looks more like the dotcom era than blockchain. Obviously there's a lot of hype and much of it will be vaporware, but I think there's also some really good stuff that's here to stay. Might be hard to tell which is which if it turns into a bubble until it's over thought...
    - plorkyeran 3y ago
      Yeah, I think dotcom era is a much better comparison. There is a lot of actual innovation happening and real products being built, but there's also a lot of companies slapping .com onto their names and pretending they're part of the new wave, and a lot of exciting new companies which don't actually have a business model. I think a lot of the current AI hype is wildly overblown, but there's zero chance that this all goes nowhere and had no lasting effect.
    - theptip 3y ago
      Yeah that’s a good baseline. Though I think it’s pessimistic; quite frankly AI is going to be far more transformative than the internet. Anyone who thinks this is like blockchain should spend 10 hours coding with GPT-4, and then extrapolate those capabilities out a few years. It’s already adding a huge amount of value and productivity gain for me, though you need to know what to use it for.
NobodyNada 3y ago
They tried A/B testing the “question formatting assistant” on the production site a few days ago. The results were…not great, and they had to quickly shut off the experiment: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeki...
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
Is this why ChatGPT answers are banned on SO? Because it would compete with their own upcoming business?
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  Really no. I’ll quote myself replying to another HN comment: > If you go to ChatGPT and just ask it, you’ll get the equivalent of asking Reddit: a decent chance of someone writing you some fan-fiction, or providing plausible bullshit for the lulz. I disagree. A layman can’t troll someone from the industry let alone a subject matter expert but ChatGPT can. It knows all the right shibboleths, appears to have the domain knowledge, then gets you in your weak spot: individual plausible facts that just aren’t true. Reddit trolls generally troll “noobs” asking entry-level questions or other readers. It’s like understanding why trolls like that exist on Reddit but not StackOverflow. And why SO has a hard ban on AI-generated answers: because the existing controls to defend against that kind of trash answer rely on sniff tests that ChatGPT passes handily.. until put to actual scrutiny.
  - meowface 3y ago
    Is there really an epidemic of troll answers? Not sure I've ever seen intentionally bad programming advice on reddit. (Unintentionally bad, sure.) Even 4chan of all places is rare in this regard, honestly, and in the cases where it does happen the answer is usually dripping with blatant sarcasm. I'd guess totally made-up answers will be way, way, way more common with LLMs compared to any human social network.
    - ComputerGuru 3y ago
      There absolutely is an epidemic of troll answers on Reddit but not on programming subs, presumably precisely because of the aforementioned reasons. The kind of person that knows the actual answer (or has sufficient background knowledge to BS a believable answer) is the kind of person that won't post a troll answer in a programming sub. The kind of person that will post a troll answer won't have the requisite background knowledge and will be immediately "outed" and downvoted on the more legitimate (not r/all) subs, and eventually be discouraged from trying. ChatGPT is immune to this organic feedback loop.
rounakdatta 3y ago
Just like wealth redistribution and inequality, I'm seeing this migration of "programming discussion" moving from open forums like SO to closed systems (guarded silos of GH Copilot, ChatGPT, Phind and others). We are preferring to ask the nitpicks in their chatbox instead of as a public comment on Stackoverflow.
fabian2k 3y ago
Take a look at the answers on this post if you want to know how their most recent genAI experiment went: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeki... In short, it was a complete disaster. They create a tool to provide formatting suggestions on your new questions by piping the entire question into ChatGPT (or one of the comparable services). The internal prompt was figured out within minutes. And there are plenty of examples of this tool messing up questions entirely. And even when it doesn't destroy the questions, it still edits far too much minor and irrelevant stuff. I don't understand how this experiment could make it this far, they actually put it into a live test on the site. So a part of the new users asking questions got this tool in this broken state. And the way this failed was entirely predictable when you just pipe content into genAI.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  I found it useful to clean up a question I wrote recently. I had to do a few round trips through it, and did need to proof read and fix what it suggested, but nothing too major. The result was something that was much tighter than my usual aspy prose, and got positive responses and suggestions and didn't seem to trigger anyone being pissy.
- bhouston 3y ago
  > The internal prompt was figured out within minutes. So what? > And there are plenty of examples of this tool messing up questions entirely. And even when it doesn't destroy the questions, it still edits far too much minor and irrelevant stuff. If it can usually help but sometimes doesn't, then this is just an optional suggestion which can be skipped. This seems like a decent design for rolling this out.
  - fabian2k 3y ago
    The users that are the most likely to benefit from this kind of tool are also the least likely to be able to judge the quality of the edits it produces. Especially if you're not a native English speaker you might not notice that it changed the meaning of the text in some way. It wasn't hard to trigger problems here, it isn't like this mostly works. And it also breaks code in a way that invalidates the question. With no visible trail of the original question being available.
weinzierl 3y ago
Can someone ELI5 for me what GenAI is? I've never heard of them and their website is just the usual content-free buzzword salad: artificial intelligence - what else, sigh! transformative - you bet business AND consumer - so basically everyone, why tell at all? various industries - everyone again pioneering - yeah, what else vertically integrated - sure, I was just waiting for that AI solution - oh, who would have thought? AI-powered!- you are saying! I've literally not even finished the second sentence on the page and this rambling abomination goes on and on and on... EDIT For reference the first two sentences: "GenAI, our mission is to harness the power of artificial intelligence to create transformative tools that benefit businesses and consumers across various industries. GenAI is a pioneering artificial intelligence company focused on developing a vertically integrated AI solutions business through its proprietary MAI Cloud™ database, with the development and commercialization of AI-powered tools and solutions for businesses and consumers across multiple industries." EDIT After reading other comments I think GenAI is a generic term (like blockchain) referring to Generative AI. In my defense the OP is not enlightening in this regard at all, so I just googled the term and the company website of genai-solutions.com was the first result. Nothing in the OP says that Stackoverflow is working with this specific company, however, that was just my (likely erroneous) assumption.
- lamp987 3y ago
  that sounds like a scam
- chx 3y ago
  It's a fancy name for automated plagiarism.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    It's generating content based on the previous content it encountered - just like a human. As such, it's only plagiarism if a human passes it as their own work (same as they would with a human ghost writer), but then it's the human plagiarising rather than the AI.
    - 3y ago
theptip 3y ago
Embedding search in a chat UI over all the SO content (with valid citations) would be the obvious feature I’d build if I were them. “Me: How do I do X? SO: here are a few highly voted answers … Me: not quite, what if to foobar is like this? SO: In that case this is probably the answer: … Me: Upvote answer (giving RLHF to the system to help with future training)” ChatGPT is great at answering code questions but if you are on SO you want to engage with the community, upvote the answer, or comment etc.

87 points by rounakdatta 3y ago

The Stackoverflow research initiatives per generative AI are very good examples of what some enterprises can do to improve user-input text context on websites and applications. 1. Adapt user text to a standard format. 2. Correct spelling and grammar mistakes. 3. Detect inconsistencies during the input process.

skilled 3y ago

And before long it's going to be, "Let AI write an answer to a question and you only need to edit it!".

agilob 3y ago
Do I need to ask the question or can I automate that too?
- Y_Y 3y ago
  If you have to ask...
- easyThrowaway 3y ago
  As someone already said in another thread somewhere, we should cut to the chase already and let ChatGPT click the ads on the page. Even better, we can further optimize the experience by simplifying all news websites, reddit, SO networks to just a few empty HTML pages with ads so the can be clicked by the AI. No need for content, agencies, editorial staff. I mean, sure, Facebook, Microsoft and Google would probably say that's against the TOS of their ad services, but after all it's not like they cared about TOSes when they used the same websites to train their models.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    You might be interested in AdNauseam: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It's a uBlock Origin fork that behaves as described.
    - reportgunner 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure the parent was sarcastic about clicking the ads.
graypegg 3y ago
I mean, that would be the “next step” wouldn’t it? I’m less scared for the big stack exchange communities which have enough people to vote out junk, but for the little ones I’m not sure.
dataengineer56 3y ago
I'd rather it helped people to write coherent questions rather than the usual dumping of a few irrelevant lines of logs onto the page and asking "please help".
armchairhacker 3y ago
> Dear members of the Stack Overflow community, I hope this question finds you well. > I am a novice in the world of JavaScript and, as part of my learning journey, I've undertaken the task of attempting to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM). Specifically, my aim is to add a new div element dynamically to my webpage, utilizing the common programming language called JavaScript. > This snippet of code is my current attempt: var newDiv = document.createElement("div"); newDiv.id = "newDiv"; newDiv.innerHTML = "This is a new div."; document.body.appendChild(newDiv); > The logic behind the above code snippet is as follows: > - I create a new div element by invoking document.createElement("div") and assign it to the variable newDiv. > - I then assign an id to the newly created div by setting newDiv.id to "newDiv". > - To add content to the div, I set newDiv.innerHTML to "This is a new div." > - Lastly, I attempt to append the new div to the body of the document using document.body.appendChild(newDiv). > Nevertheless, the code does not seem to produce the "div" I was hoping for. Additionally, there are no errors displayed on the console. I have attempted to diagnose the issue myself but have failed, and I have exhausted all other online resources > Time is of the essence. Additionally, I would prefer this answer to be as concise and easy to understand as possible. Your guidance and assistance in this matter is very much appreciated. > Thanks in advance, > user4798145768
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  [closed]: needs details or clarity 0 comments

malfist 3y ago

Whatever happened with the moderator strike over the AI? This seems like a great way to cheapen the brand.

mwint 3y ago
Still ongoing.

csjh 3y ago

Duplicate question closing will now be instant if your question has an embedding that's remotely close to another question

ethbr0 3y ago
It really is obscene how many useful answers I've found on threads that were subsequently closed as duplicate -- with a link to a question that's not even close to the same.
- coffeeshopgoth 3y ago
  I was going to post this response, too. Yes, you can close it because it is duplicate, but god knows the huge range of how good people are at explaining something to people of various levels of understanding.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    After reviewing a few meta posts on it, much appears to boil down to there being poor SO UX options. I.e. there isn't a "closed for being homework" category Consequently, duplicate served as the go-to but inappropriate "there's something wrong with this, and I don't want to deal with it" button.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Can you provide a link to an example or two of that happening?
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    As near as I can tell, SO prunes duplicate-tagged questions. I 404d on the first few examples I pulled.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      Users with 10k reputation will be able to see them even though they're deleted. Can you post them anyway?

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

SO could go on all in using the 100k context length of Anthropic Claude, feed in the documentation of a library or product, and have it generate questions and answers, and post them on Stack Overflow to fake activity now that everyone I know participates on it in a read-only fashion.

madsbuch 3y ago

As writing, all comments seems to be quite negative. I think this is awesome and definitely something that can unlock a lot for me. I problem I often encounter when using stack overflow is that questions are answered ina a very narrow way that doesn't really fit me. So I need to bounce between 3-4 answers that are related to get the right solution. I would guess this solution could do this for me, provided that I provide anough context is my problem prompt.

nomilk 3y ago

The projects listed [1] seem a bit mundane at first, but I prefer that to the opposite, where companies shoehorn GPT into places where it just irritates users. [1] Title generation, Formatting assistant, Sentiment analysis, Identifying duplicate questions

stabbles 3y ago

In a way SO is the perfect platform for human feedback in reinforcement learning

nomilk 3y ago
True, feedback on stack overflow can be brutally thorough and exacting to an extreme that the general population (or a mechanical turk) would struggle to emulate; perfect feedback for a LLM.

OldManRyan 3y ago

Me: Hey AI how do I do this using X? AI: Why would you ever want to do that using X? You should do Y. Me: Well I need to do it using X because of these reasons. AI: ...That's dumb. You should just do Y.

nolok 3y ago
Use jquery
brycewray 3y ago
That AI is definitely trained on past SO content.
sideshowb 3y ago
Closed as duplicate of "how do I do that using X" even though on close inspection that!=this
falcor84 3y ago
That actually sounds amazing - I would love to see the AI express opinions that contradict mine - all that I'm getting is "I apologize for the confusion. You're right ..." If it was actually capable of having these kinds of conversations, it would be on its way to solving the XY Problem [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

ulrikhansen54 3y ago

Their traffic is rumoured to be down 25-30% after ChatGPT was released, so good to see that they are doing something to keep the community alive in the new era of GenAI.

nolok 3y ago
I don't know about ChatGPT, but for me Phind [1] really lowered my SO usage [1] https://www.phind.com/ https://www.phind.com/
- 6DM 3y ago
  I've tried Phind a few times, but my gripe with it, so far, is it gives me outdated examples that don't work because the API has changed. Is there some magic keywords I should be including to prevent that?
  - nolok 3y ago
    Not sure about that, it's been mostly good for me in the case I needed it
    - 6DM 3y ago
      Maybe my use case of dotnet core development is going to be different than for python devs.
  - rounakdatta 3y ago
    Make sure that you're logged in, and have turned on the GPT-4 toggle?
    - 6DM 3y ago
      I assume that by GPT-4, you're talking about the "Use Best Model" toggle right?
- chx 3y ago

ryandrake 3y ago

I feel like GenAI has become the next "blockchain". Wall Street (or someone else!) is setting some weird expectation for every company to somehow say "we're doing something with GenAI." Doesn't matter what it is they're doing with it, they just have to say the magic word in a press release or blog post. Apparently, "we're using AI" is a better story than "we're making great products, regardless of the underlying tech."

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ladberg 3y ago
In my opinion it's significantly more meaningful than blockchain hype. Blockchain doesn't add any value whatsoever for 99% of the use-cases that companies were advertising it for, but AI can immediately and cheaply create output that previously would have been expensive, time-consuming, or impossible.
- dandellion 3y ago
  To me it looks more like the dotcom era than blockchain. Obviously there's a lot of hype and much of it will be vaporware, but I think there's also some really good stuff that's here to stay. Might be hard to tell which is which if it turns into a bubble until it's over thought...
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    Yeah, I think dotcom era is a much better comparison. There is a lot of actual innovation happening and real products being built, but there's also a lot of companies slapping .com onto their names and pretending they're part of the new wave, and a lot of exciting new companies which don't actually have a business model. I think a lot of the current AI hype is wildly overblown, but there's zero chance that this all goes nowhere and had no lasting effect.
  - theptip 3y ago
    Yeah that’s a good baseline. Though I think it’s pessimistic; quite frankly AI is going to be far more transformative than the internet. Anyone who thinks this is like blockchain should spend 10 hours coding with GPT-4, and then extrapolate those capabilities out a few years. It’s already adding a huge amount of value and productivity gain for me, though you need to know what to use it for.

NobodyNada 3y ago

They tried A/B testing the “question formatting assistant” on the production site a few days ago. The results were…not great, and they had to quickly shut off the experiment: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeki...

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

Is this why ChatGPT answers are banned on SO? Because it would compete with their own upcoming business?

ComputerGuru 3y ago
Really no. I’ll quote myself replying to another HN comment: > If you go to ChatGPT and just ask it, you’ll get the equivalent of asking Reddit: a decent chance of someone writing you some fan-fiction, or providing plausible bullshit for the lulz. I disagree. A layman can’t troll someone from the industry let alone a subject matter expert but ChatGPT can. It knows all the right shibboleths, appears to have the domain knowledge, then gets you in your weak spot: individual plausible facts that just aren’t true. Reddit trolls generally troll “noobs” asking entry-level questions or other readers. It’s like understanding why trolls like that exist on Reddit but not StackOverflow. And why SO has a hard ban on AI-generated answers: because the existing controls to defend against that kind of trash answer rely on sniff tests that ChatGPT passes handily.. until put to actual scrutiny.
- meowface 3y ago
  Is there really an epidemic of troll answers? Not sure I've ever seen intentionally bad programming advice on reddit. (Unintentionally bad, sure.) Even 4chan of all places is rare in this regard, honestly, and in the cases where it does happen the answer is usually dripping with blatant sarcasm. I'd guess totally made-up answers will be way, way, way more common with LLMs compared to any human social network.
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    There absolutely is an epidemic of troll answers on Reddit but not on programming subs, presumably precisely because of the aforementioned reasons. The kind of person that knows the actual answer (or has sufficient background knowledge to BS a believable answer) is the kind of person that won't post a troll answer in a programming sub. The kind of person that will post a troll answer won't have the requisite background knowledge and will be immediately "outed" and downvoted on the more legitimate (not r/all) subs, and eventually be discouraged from trying. ChatGPT is immune to this organic feedback loop.

rounakdatta 3y ago

Just like wealth redistribution and inequality, I'm seeing this migration of "programming discussion" moving from open forums like SO to closed systems (guarded silos of GH Copilot, ChatGPT, Phind and others). We are preferring to ask the nitpicks in their chatbox instead of as a public comment on Stackoverflow.

fabian2k 3y ago

Take a look at the answers on this post if you want to know how their most recent genAI experiment went: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeki... In short, it was a complete disaster. They create a tool to provide formatting suggestions on your new questions by piping the entire question into ChatGPT (or one of the comparable services). The internal prompt was figured out within minutes. And there are plenty of examples of this tool messing up questions entirely. And even when it doesn't destroy the questions, it still edits far too much minor and irrelevant stuff. I don't understand how this experiment could make it this far, they actually put it into a live test on the site. So a part of the new users asking questions got this tool in this broken state. And the way this failed was entirely predictable when you just pipe content into genAI.

lamontcg 3y ago
I found it useful to clean up a question I wrote recently. I had to do a few round trips through it, and did need to proof read and fix what it suggested, but nothing too major. The result was something that was much tighter than my usual aspy prose, and got positive responses and suggestions and didn't seem to trigger anyone being pissy.
bhouston 3y ago
> The internal prompt was figured out within minutes. So what? > And there are plenty of examples of this tool messing up questions entirely. And even when it doesn't destroy the questions, it still edits far too much minor and irrelevant stuff. If it can usually help but sometimes doesn't, then this is just an optional suggestion which can be skipped. This seems like a decent design for rolling this out.
- fabian2k 3y ago
  The users that are the most likely to benefit from this kind of tool are also the least likely to be able to judge the quality of the edits it produces. Especially if you're not a native English speaker you might not notice that it changed the meaning of the text in some way. It wasn't hard to trigger problems here, it isn't like this mostly works. And it also breaks code in a way that invalidates the question. With no visible trail of the original question being available.

weinzierl 3y ago

Can someone ELI5 for me what GenAI is? I've never heard of them and their website is just the usual content-free buzzword salad: artificial intelligence - what else, sigh! transformative - you bet business AND consumer - so basically everyone, why tell at all? various industries - everyone again pioneering - yeah, what else vertically integrated - sure, I was just waiting for that AI solution - oh, who would have thought? AI-powered!- you are saying! I've literally not even finished the second sentence on the page and this rambling abomination goes on and on and on... EDIT For reference the first two sentences: "GenAI, our mission is to harness the power of artificial intelligence to create transformative tools that benefit businesses and consumers across various industries. GenAI is a pioneering artificial intelligence company focused on developing a vertically integrated AI solutions business through its proprietary MAI Cloud™ database, with the development and commercialization of AI-powered tools and solutions for businesses and consumers across multiple industries." EDIT After reading other comments I think GenAI is a generic term (like blockchain) referring to Generative AI. In my defense the OP is not enlightening in this regard at all, so I just googled the term and the company website of genai-solutions.com was the first result. Nothing in the OP says that Stackoverflow is working with this specific company, however, that was just my (likely erroneous) assumption.

lamp987 3y ago
that sounds like a scam
chx 3y ago
It's a fancy name for automated plagiarism.
- falcor84 3y ago
  It's generating content based on the previous content it encountered - just like a human. As such, it's only plagiarism if a human passes it as their own work (same as they would with a human ghost writer), but then it's the human plagiarising rather than the AI.
  - 3y ago

theptip 3y ago

Embedding search in a chat UI over all the SO content (with valid citations) would be the obvious feature I’d build if I were them. “Me: How do I do X? SO: here are a few highly voted answers … Me: not quite, what if to foobar is like this? SO: In that case this is probably the answer: … Me: Upvote answer (giving RLHF to the system to help with future training)” ChatGPT is great at answering code questions but if you are on SO you want to engage with the community, upvote the answer, or comment etc.