15 ms·

Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

• thebigspacefuck 2y ago
  I’ve recently gone back to search/stack overflow and it’s amazing. I search a few words and find exactly what I’m looking for in milliseconds. Relevant documentation comes up as well. I scan the results and know immediately if it’s what I need. With ChatGPT I’m waiting seconds or even 10+ seconds for a response, it can be 100% wrong and I then have to readjust my question or point out how it’s wrong which takes me a while.
• gwern 2y ago
  Note for those suffering from deja vu: this was extensively highlighted and touted by critics back in July 2023 as "Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow" https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367 including HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36763718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36763718
  • zahlman 2y ago
    Worth noting Stack Overflow's own meta discussion of that: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425651 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425651 ; relatedly https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425635 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425635 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422392 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422392.
• genr8 2y ago
  we are in the machine's feedback loop.
• msephton 2y ago
  If the Q & A is already out there if argue we don't need it asking and, if we're lucky, answering again. If the Q & A isn't our there, then it'll be asked on an online platform.
• scotty79 2y ago
  Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
  • lordgrenville 2y ago
    The answer by humans is a) publicly accessible b) hallucination-free (although it still may not be correct) c) subject to a voting process which gives a good signal of how much we should trust it. Which makes me think, maybe a good move for Stack Overflow (which does not allow the submission of LLM-generated answers, wisely imo) would be to add an AI agent that would suggest an answer for each question, that people could vote on. That way you can elicit human and machine answers, and still have the verification process.
    • scotty79 2y ago
      It's a good idea but probably not easy to implement. SO answers are usually quite neat, like an email. Solving a problem with ChatGPT is more like ... chat. It's hard to turn it into something googlable and Google is how SO gets most of its traffic and utility.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      LLMs are much better experience on the "Q side". Sure, there's the occasional hallucination here and there, but QnA sites are not all StackOverflow. Most of them are just content farms for SEO and advertising purposes - meaning, the veracity of the content doesn't matter, as long as it's driving clicks. At this moment, this makes LLMs much more trustworthy.
    • intended 2y ago
      Why a vote? Voting != Verification.
    • Davidzheng 2y ago
      I don't think human mistakes are distinguishable from hallucinations.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  It's a losing battle to try and maintain walled gardens for these corpuses of human-generated text that have become valuable to train LLMs. The horse has probably already bolted. I see this as a temporary problem however because LLMs are transitional. At some point it won't be necessary to train an LLM on the entirety of Reddit plus everything else ever written because there are obvious limits to statistical models like this and, as a counter point, that's not how humans learn. You may have read hundres of books in your life, maybe even thousands. You haven't read a million. You don't need to. I find it interesting that this issue (which is theft, to be clear) is being framed as theft from the site or company that "owns" that data, rather than theft from the users who created it. All these user-generated content ("UGC") sites are doomed to eventually fail because their motivations diverge from their users and the endless quest to increase profits inevitably drives users away. Another issue is how much IP consumption constitutes theft? If an LLM watches every movie ever made, that's probably theft. But how many is too many? Like Apocalypse Now was loosely based on or at least inspired by Heart of Darkness (the novel). Yet you can't accuse a human of "theft" by reading Heart of Darkness. All art is derivative, as they say.
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    > At some point it won't be necessary to train an LLM on the entirety of Reddit plus everything else ever written because there are obvious limits to statistical models like this and, as a counter point, that's not how humans learn. You may have read hundres of books in your life, maybe even thousands. You haven't read a million. You don't need to. I agree but I think it may be privileging the human intelligence mechanism a bit too much. These LLMs are polymaths that can spit out content at a super human rate. It can generate poetry and literature similarly to code and answers about physics and car repair. It’s very rare for a human to be able to do that especially these days. So I agree they’re transitional but only in the sense that our brains are transitional from the basal ganglia to the neocortex. In that sense I think LLMs will probably be a part of a future GAI brain with other things tracked on, but it’s not clear it will necessarily evolve to work like a human’s brain does.
    • jprete 2y ago
• Artgor 2y ago
  Well, if the users ask frequent/common questions to ChatGPT and get acceptable answers, is this even a problem? If the volume of duplicate questions decreases, there should be no bad influence on the training data, right?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • jeremyjh 2y ago
    They spoke to this point in the abstract. They observe a similar drop in less common and more advanced questions.
  • erie 2y ago
    I have queried gemini about a specific issue and when it failed to give a decent answer I narrowed down the issue with hints about the answer, it responded with details from an old post by me on reddit.
• timhh 2y ago
  Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
  • tomrod 2y ago
    While not exactly the same wording, this was my also first thought. There have been two places that I remember where arrogance of the esoterati drive two feedback cycles: 1. People leave after seeking help for an issue they believed needed the input of masters. 2. Because of gruff treatment, the masters receive complaints and indignation, triggering a backfire effect feedback loop, often under the guise of said masters not wanting to be overwhelmed by common problems and issues. There is a few practical things that can help with this (clear guides to point to, etc.), but the missing element is kindness / non-judgmental responsiveness.
  • croes 2y ago
    How can it be an alternative if it needs the data from Stackoverflow?
    • OgsyedIE 2y ago
      Because consumers in every market develop models of reality (and make purchasing decisions) on the basis of their best attempts to derive accuracy from their own inevitably flawed perceptions, instead of having perfect information about every aspect of the world?
  • miohtama 2y ago
    It's an interesting question. The world has had 30 years to come up with a StackOverflow alternative with friendly mods. It hasn't. So the question is that has someone tried hard enough or can it be done it the first place. I am Stack overflow mod, dealing with other mods. There is definitely unnecessary hostility there, but most of question closes and downvotes Go 90% to low quality questiond which lack proper professionalism to warrant anyone's time. It is remaining 10% that turns off people. We can also take analogs from the death of Usenet.
• optimiz3 2y ago
  If a site aims to commoditize shared expertise, royalties should be paid. Why would anyone willingly reduce their earning power, let alone hand away the right for someone else to profit from selling their knowledge, unattributed no less. Best bet is to book publish, and require a license from anyone that wants to train on it.
  • afh1 2y ago
    Why open source anything, let alone with permissive licensing, right?
    • optimiz3 2y ago
      To a degree, yes. I only open source work where I expect reciprocal value from other contributions.
      • benfortuna 2y ago
        I think that is antithetical to the idea of Open Source. If you expect contributions then pay a bounty, don't pretend.
        • andrepd 2y ago
          GPL is antithetical to open source? Odd take
          • verdverm 2y ago
            There is a permissionless (MIT) vs permissioned (GPL) difference that is at the heart of the debate of what society thinks open source should mean
            • deleted 2y ago
              [deleted]
        • optimiz3 2y ago
• vitiral 2y ago
  We need to refine our tech stack to create a new one which is understandable by humans, before LLMs pollute our current stack to the point it's impossible to understand or modify. That's what I'm doing at https://lua.civboot.org https://lua.civboot.org
• rkncland 2y ago
  Of course people reduce their free contributions to Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is selling then out with the OpenAI API agreement and countless "AI" hype blog posts.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    This is on top of an existing long-term trend (since 2014 or so) of increasing frustration at the quality and nature of questions (failure to adhere to site guidelines, nor indeed to put effort into understanding how the site is intended to work).
  • jeremyjh 2y ago
    I think this is more about a drop in questions, than a drop in answers.
    • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      I mean part of the reason to not ask about stuff on SO, there are several types of questions that one might like to ask - such as: I don't know the first thing about this thing, help me get to where I know the first thing. This is not allowed any more. I want to know the pros and cons of various things compared. this is not allowed. I have quality questions regarding an approach that I know how to do, but I want to know better ways. This is generally not allowed but you might slip through if you ask it just right. I pretty much know really well what I'm doing but having some difficulty finding the right documentation on some little thing,help me - this is allowe Something does not work as per the documentation, help me, this is allowed I think I have done everything right but it is not working, this is allowed and is generally a typo or something that you have put in the wrong order because you're tired. At any rate, the ones that are not allowed are the only questions that are worth asking. The last two that is allowed I generally find gets answered in the asking - I'm pretty good in the field I'm asking in, the rigor of making something match SO question requirements leads me to the answer. If I ask one of the interesting disallowed questions and get shit on then I will probably go through a period of screw it, I will just look extra hard for the documentation before I bother with that site again.
• melenaboija 2y ago
  It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.
  • PhilipRoman 2y ago
    I haven't really found stackoverflow to be that humiliating (compared to some IRC rooms or forums), basic questions get asked and answered all the time. But the worst part is when you want to do something off the beaten path. Q: how do I do thing X in C? A: Why do you need to know this? The C standard doesn't say anything about X. The answer will depend on your compiler and platform. Are you sure you want to do X instead Y? What version of Ubuntu are you running?
    • mhh__ 2y ago
      I find that this is mainly a problem in languages that attract "practical"/"best tool for the job" Philistines. Not going to name names right now but I had never really experienced this until I started using languages from a certain Washington based software company.
      • appendix-rock 2y ago
        God. Yeah. I’ve always hated #IAMPolicies on Freenode :)
    • haolez 2y ago
      The first time that I asked a question on #cpp @Freenode was a unique experience for my younger self. My message contained greetings and the question in the same message. I was banned immediately and the response from the mods was: - do not greet; we don't have time for that bullshit - do not use natural language questions; submit a test case and we will understand what you mean through your code - do not abbreviate words (you have abbreviated "you" as "u"); if you do not have time to type the words, we do not have time to read them The ban lasted for a week! :D
• MASNeo 2y ago
  Wondering about wider implications. If technical interactions reduce online, how about RL and how do we rate a human competence against an AI once society gets a habit from asking an AI first? Will we start to constantly question human advice or responses and what does that do to the human condition. I am active in a few specialized fields and already I have to defined my advice against poorly crafted prompt responses.
  • VancouverMan 2y ago
    > Will we start to constantly question human advice or responses and what does that do to the human condition. I'm surprised when people don't already engage in questioning like that. I've had to be doing it for decades at this point. Much of the worst advice and information I've ever received has come from expensive human so-called "professionals" and "experts" like doctors, accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, professors, journalists, mechanics, and so on. I now assume that anything such "experts" tell me is wrong, and too often that ends up being true. Sourcing information and advice from a larger pool of online knowledge, even if the sources may be deemed "amateur" or "hobbyist" or "unreliable", has generally provided me with far better results and outcomes. If an LLM is built upon a wide base of source information, I'm inclined to trust what it generates more than what a single human "professional" or "expert" says.
    • MASNeo 2y ago
      If an LLM is built upon a wide base of source information, I'm inclined to trust what it generates more than what a single human "professional" or "expert" says. --------- That, and if the prompt to the LLM has been made with a minimum of thought you may get a reasonable answer, perhaps a better one. The consensus is powerful but the two limitations "wide base" and "thoughtful prompt" are big limitations because for specialised fields these limitations apply often. So I am surprise people are inclined to believe the machine more than the human.
    • wizzwizz4 2y ago
      These systems behave more like individual experts than like the internet – except they're more likely to be wrong than an expert is.
• bloomingkales 2y ago
  Guess we need an Agent that logs and re-contributes to Stackoverflow (for example) automatically. Then also have agents that automatically give upvotes for used solutions. Weird world. I’m just imagining the precogs talking to each other in Minority Report if that makes sense.
• mrcino 2y ago
  By Public knowledge sharing, do they mean bazillions of StackOverflow duplicates?
  • knotimpressed 2y ago
    The article mentions that all kinds of posts were reduced, not just duplicates or even simple questions.
• Havoc 2y ago
  I’d imagine they also narrow the range of knowledge and discourse in general. A bit like if you ask an LLM to tell you a joke they all tend to go with the same one
• rq1 2y ago
  People should just share their conversations with the LLMs online no? This would blogging 5.0. Or web 7.0.
  • qntmfred 2y ago
    That's pretty much what my youtube channel is turning into. just me talking to myself with chatgpt as co-host eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB59Bz-F04E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB59Bz-F04E
  • SunlitCat 2y ago
    Well, I just asked ChatGPT to answer my "How to print hello world in c++" with a typical stack overflow answer. Lo and behold, the answer is very polite, explanative and even lists common mistakes. It even added two very helpful user comments! I asked it again how this answer would look in 2024 and it just updated the answer to the latest c++ standard! Then! I asked it what a moderator would say when they chime in. Of course the moderator reminded everyone to stay on focus regarding the question, avoid opinions and back their answer by documentation or standards. In the end the mod thanked for everyone's contribution and keeping the discussion constructive! Ah! What a wonderful world ChatGPT is living at! I want to be there too!
• verdverm 2y ago
  For me, many of my questions about open source projects have moved to GitHub and Discord, so there is platform migration besides LLMs. I also tend to start with Gemini for more general programming things, because it will (1) answer in the terms of my problem instead of me having to visit multiple pages to piece it together, or (2) what it's wrong, I often get better jump off points when searching. Either way, LLMs save me time instead of having to click through to SO multiple times because the title is close but the content as an important difference
  • joshdavham 2y ago
    > many of my questions about open source projects have moved to GitHub and Discord Exact same experience here. Plus, being able to talk to maintainers directly has been great!
    • klabb3 2y ago
      No doubt that discord has struck a good balance. Much better than GitHub imo. Both for maintainers to get a soft understanding of their users, and equally beneficial for users who can interact casually without being shamed for filing an issue the wrong way. There’s some weird blind spot with techies who are unable to see the appeal. UX matters in a “the medium is the message”-kind of way. Also, GitHub is only marginally more open than discord. It’s indexable at the moment, yes, but would not surprise me at all if MS is gonna make an offensive move to protect “their” (read our) data from AI competitors.
      • verdverm 2y ago
        Chat is an important medium, especially as new generations of developers enter the field (they are more chat native). It certainly offers a more comfortable, or appropriate place, to ask beginner questions, or have quick back-n-forths, than GitHub issues/discussions offers. I've always wondered why GH didn't incorporate chat, seems like a big missed opportunity.
        • BlueTemplar 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• atomic128 2y ago
  Eventually, large language models will be the end of open source. That's ok, just accept it. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. That's how it ends.
  • yapyap 2y ago
    no it won’t, it’ll just make it more niche than it already is.
    • atomic128 2y ago
      LLM users are feeding their entropy into the model, and paying for the privilege. These LLM users produce the new training data. They are being assimilated into the tool. This is the future of "open source": Anonymous common property continuously harvested from, and distributed to, LLM users.
  • zmgsabst 2y ago
    Why wouldn’t you use LLMs to write even more open source? The cost of contributions falls dramatically, eg, $100 is 200M tokens of GPT-3.5; so you’re talking enough to spend 10,000 tokens developing each line of a 20kloc project (amortized). That’s a moderate project for a single donation and an afternoon of managing a workflow framework.
    • atomic128 2y ago
      What you're describing is "open slop", and yes, there will be a lot of it. Open source as we know it today, not so much.
  • gspr 2y ago
    I don't understand this take. If LLMs will be the end of open source, then they will constitute that end for exactly the reason you write: > Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. > This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. > In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. And if those things are true and allowed to continue, then any IP relying on copyright is equally threatened. That could of course be the case, but it's hardly unique to open source. Open source is no different, here. Or are you suggesting that non-open-source copyrighted material (code or otherwise) is protected by keeping the "source" (or equivalent) secret? Good luck making money on that blockbuster movie if you don't dare show it to anyone, or that novel if you don't dare let people read it. > The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. First of all: Those aren't the only social rewards that motivate open source work. I'd even wager they aren't the most common motivators. Those rewards seem more like the image that actors that try to social-network-ify or gamify open source work want to paint. Second: Why would those things go away? The artistic joy that drives a portrait painter didn't go away when the camera was invented. Sure, the pure monetary drive might suffer, but that drive is perhaps the drive that's least specific to open source work.
• joshdavham 2y ago
  With that being said, I imagine the quality of the questions have also improved quite a bit. I definitely don’t condone the rude behaviour on SO, but I also understand that the site used to be bombarded constantly with low quality questions that now thankfully LLMs can handle.
• okoma 2y ago
  The authors claim that LLM are reducing public knowledge sharing and that the effect is not merely displacing duplicate, low-quality, or beginner-level content. However their claim is weak and the effect is not quite as sensational as they make it sound. First, they only present Figure 3 and not regression results for their suggested tests of LLMs being substitutes of bad quality posts. In contrast, they report tests for their random qualification by user experience (where someone is experienced if they posted 10 times). Now, why would they omit tests by post quality but show results by a random bucketing of user “experience”? Second, their own Figure 3 “shows” a change in trends for good and neutral questions. Good questions were downtrending and now they are flat, and neutral questions (arguably the noise) went from an uptrend to flat. Bad question continue to go down, no visible change in the trend. This suggests the opposite, ie that LLMs are in fact substituting bad quality content. I feel the conclusion needed a stronger statement and research doesn’t reward meticulous but unsurprising results. Hence the sensational title and the somewhat redacted results.
  • Forgeties79 2y ago
    While this article doesn’t really seem to be hitting what I am about to say, I think someone on HN a while back described a related phenomenon (which leads to the same issue) really well. The Internet is Balkanizing. This is hardly a new concept but they were drilling down specifically into online communities. People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating into discord and other services where they can put down motes and raise the draw bridges. And who can blame them? So many forums and social media sites and forums are engaging in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes, AI/LLM’s are crawling everywhere vacuuming up everything then putting them behind paywalls and ruining the original sources’ abilities to be found in search, algorithms designed to create engagement foster vitriol and controversy, the list goes on. HN is a rare exception these days. So what happens? A bunch of people with niche interests or knowledge sets congregate into private communities and only talk to each other. Which makes it harder for new people to join. It’s a sad state of affairs if you ask me.
    • Simran-B 2y ago
• kajaktum 2y ago
  I have no idea where to ask questions nowadays. Stackoverflow is way "too slow" (Go to website, write a nice well formatted thread, wait for answers). But there's way faster solutions now, namely from message groups. For example, I was wondering if its okay to move my home directory to a different filesystem altogether and create a symlink from /home/. Where do I ask such questions? The freaking ZFS mailing list? SO? It was just a passerby question, and what I wanted more than the answer is the sense of community. The only place that I know that have a wide enough range of interest, with many people that each know some of these stuff quite deep, is public, is easily accessible is unironically 4chan /g/. I would rather go there then Discord where humanity's knowledge will be piped to /dev/null.
  • CoastalCoder 2y ago
    I guess I'm out of the loop. What does "/g/" mean?
    • aezart 2y ago
      It's the technology message board on 4chan, each board has a name like that. /a/ for anime, /v/ for video games, etc.
  • nunez 2y ago
    Reddit was a place until the API changes were made. Discord is another at the cost of public discoverability. Barring that, man pages and groking the sources.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The problem is eventually what are LLMs going’s to draw from? They’re not creating new information, just regurgitating and combining existing info. That’s why they perform so poorly on code for which there aren’t many many publicly available samples, SO/reddit answers etc.
  • moi2388 2y ago
    Simple. Codebases on GitHub, research papers posted on journals, raw data posted online, phone data, emails.. There is plenty of data even without QA forums.
  • mycall 2y ago
    I thought synthetic data is what is partially training the new multimodal large models, i.e. AlphaGeometry, o1, etc.
    • antisthenes 2y ago
      Synthetic data without some kind of external validation is garbage. E.g. you can't just synthetically generate code, something or someone needs to run it and see if it performs the functions you actually asked of it. You need to feed the LLM output into some kind of formal verification system, and only then add it back to the synthetic training dataset. Here, for example - dumb recursive training causes model collapse: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
      • jneagu 2y ago
        Anecdotally, synthetic data can get good if the generation involves a nugget of human labels/feedback that gets scaled up w/ a generative process.
      • HPsquared 2y ago
        There are definitely a lot of wrong ways to do it. Doesn't mean the basic idea is unsound.
    • 2y ago
• gigatexal 2y ago
  Because toxic but well meaning mods at stack overflow made us not want to use them anymore.
  • amelius 2y ago
    I tried several times to become active on SO, but always ran into the chicken-and-egg problem of not having enough points to do it. Very frustrating.
• fforflo 2y ago
  Well, we know we'll have reached AGI when LLM says "this chat has been marked as duplicate"
• p0w3n3d 2y ago
  That's what I've been predicting and scared of: LLMs learn from online Q&A platforms, but people already stop posting questions and receiving answers. The sole knowledge sources will get poisoned with inaccurate LLM generated data, and therefore the entropy available to LLMs will become damped by the LLMs itselves (in a negative feedback loop)
• Abecid 2y ago
  I think this is just the future though. Why ask other people if LLMs can just retrieve, read, and train on official documentations
  • jetsetk 2y ago
    Official documentations are not always complete. It depends on the diligence of who wrote them and how good they are at writing. Customers and users will always send mails or open tickets to ask this and that about the docs afterwards. Can't rely on just learning or retrieving from the docs. Clarifications by some dev or someone who found a solution/workaround will always be required.
  • dogleash 2y ago
    If people are withdrawing from writing secondary documentation, why wouldn't they also withdraw from writing official documentation? And don't say they wouldn't, we've already watched business decisions be made to pull back on spending to produce official documentation as the availability of the internet grew to the point vendors understood that everyone has always-online internet connections.
• mococa 2y ago
  Marked as duplicated.
• torginus 2y ago
  Honestly, online QA platforms do a fine job by themselves. Just today, I've found out that Quora started locking its high-quality answers made by actual experts behind paywalls. Get bent.
• immibis 2y ago
  So do the new corporate policies of those platforms.
• Terretta 2y ago
  People don't post where they aren't visiting. They're not visiting Stack Overflow for well-read material (the popular languages) because perplexity.ai, ChatGPT, Claude, etc., not only answer questions better than reading pages of StackOverflow, but will cut and paste the (right or wrong) answer for you faster. If you're not on StackOverflow while asking questions, you aren't answering things there either. Nothing else is needed to explain their observations. Of course, this means that to compete, StackOverflow and other Q&A forums must bring the answering usability (integrating answers into one's flow) to the top.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    Competing with AI is an explicit non-goal of the Stack Overflow community, as well as the one other Q&A forum I use (Codidact). AI won't "answer questions better". It will cut out the middleman of parsing your question and matching it up with words in the shape of an answer. It will also frequently hallucinate, and essentially never sanity-check what you're trying to do. But the main thing giving it a speed/convenience advantage over Q&A forums is that it doesn't give a damn about whether your question, and its answer, could help someone else (by being discoverable with a search engine and understood by that other person as being the same question, and being focused on a single issue). Aside from not being designed to care, it wouldn't benefit: it can just re-generate the same answer content for the next person who asks, in a different low-quality way. Unlike a human expert, AI will never tire of that task.
    • famouswaffles 2y ago
      It definitely answers certain questions better and languages, topics these models are less capable at are hit less. The denial at this point doesn't make any sense.
• hollownobody 2y ago
  I disagree. LLMs are creating new knowledge when they are being used. A conversation with an LLM can carry a lot of signal in the user's input. I routinely send whole snippets of code, alongside an explanation/question as input.
• lizknope 2y ago
  I subscribe to a bunch of technical subreddits and over the last 2 years I've seen so many questions spammed to multiple subreddits. The account is new or every reply seems to be generic 1 line responses that could be autogenerated. I assume they are bot accounts to train an AI. Now before I write a longer technical explanation I look to determine if this is a real human asking and only then will I bother to reply.
  • acuozzo 2y ago
    You're helping to train them regardless. I reckon that, ultimately, the success of "gift culture", "kNoWlEdGe ShOuLd Be Free!!!1", F/OSS, et al. via the WWW will cast this entire Stallman-esque hacker ethos in a bad light. We all work for IBM^H^H^HOpenAI, but there's nothing like the GPL to back us up now!