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Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

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Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#71
post #60

Just finished Neil Stephenson's Anethem. In it (I'm paraphrasing here) the open internet is destroyed by media companies who flood the internet with "good garbage", that is stuff that is _almost_ correct. It forced people to pay for curated accurate content (that is, pay the same people who generated the good garbage in the first place).

This is the scary thing about this - I keep asking it questions, and it gives confident, lengthy responses that look perfect. But when you read it thoroughly, you start noticing small but important mistakes that are not obvious at first.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is most likely already working on its own version. They have the resources and ML chops to probably build one far more powerful. I'd bet they'll stay dominant

Any tool that doesn’t force you to click on many page views to get an answer is bad for Google search. They want you to peruse and click on sites riddled with google ads as many times as possible. These incentives have led to quality of results getting worse over time. The only way Google is launching this type of model would be if they could embed ads in the answers and even potentially bake them in. Which would als…

"Here is an example of using async IO in Java which you should read while enjoying a refreshing Coke(tm)."

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#73
post #62

I tried to create openai account, but seems e-mail is not enough for them and they require also phone number, not sure why, so I gave up, I provide my phone number only where it's essential.

This might not be essential, but you're missing out on playing with some amazing technology.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#74
post #71
post #60

Just finished Neil Stephenson's Anethem. In it (I'm paraphrasing here) the open internet is destroyed by media companies who flood the internet with "good garbage", that is stuff that is _almost_ correct. It forced people to pay for curated accurate content (that is, pay the same people who generated the good garbage in the first place).

This is the scary thing about this - I keep asking it questions, and it gives confident, lengthy responses that look perfect. But when you read it thoroughly, you start noticing small but important mistakes that are not obvious at first.

I tried to get it to dig into some ethical questions and it was disturbing to see how cogent the argument was while mostly overlooking the ethical concerns of the question.

I know it’s not actually meant to do that in the first place, but it’s quite excellent at it despite that shortcoming. I’m not looking forward to AIs learning to become even more convincing and authoritative.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#75
post #60

Just finished Neil Stephenson's Anethem. In it (I'm paraphrasing here) the open internet is destroyed by media companies who flood the internet with "good garbage", that is stuff that is _almost_ correct. It forced people to pay for curated accurate content (that is, pay the same people who generated the good garbage in the first place).

I think much of the social corrosiveness of the web and news media as it stands is due to the adoption of advertising as the primary means of funding content creation, the resulting expectation that most content should be free, and the failure to produce effective micropayment systems so that paid content has become synonymous with paywalls (high cost barriers around large bodies of content). I would love to see a world in which it is possible to directly pay for content in a very fine grained and frictionless manner, and in which doing so is the norm.

I hadn't considered that the success of large language models might break the current system in a way that can only be fixed by moving it in the direction I'd like to see (but maybe not the micropayments). What an exciting thought :-D

I must read Anathem, maybe it'll change my mind. Neal Stephenson's always great anyway.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#76
post #62

I tried to create openai account, but seems e-mail is not enough for them and they require also phone number, not sure why, so I gave up, I provide my phone number only where it's essential.

They send an SMS code to sign up with.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#77

What is the mechanism by which a text is determined to originate from ChatGPT? This will be crucial for preventing unfavorable training loops among a myriad of other human-led control efforts.

To determine if a post on StackOverflow is generated by ChatGPT, you could look for certain characteristics that are typical of posts generated by the model. For example, ChatGPT posts may contain repetitive or nonsensical phrases, lack coherence or context, or have a distinctive "machine-like" writing style. Additionally, you can check the user profile of the poster to see if it indicates that the user is a language…

This needs to be a copypasta.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#78

I tried ChatGPT with a few SO questions as input, it was completely missing the point of the questions more often than not. I got 3 bad answers and one correct one out of it. The scary part was just how confidently incorrect it was. The text looked very good, but there were big errors in there. I also tried to ask it a scientific question on a pretty niche field, and it produced a very reasonably looking answer. Most…

Scientific questions are, without being disparaging, mostly trivia. ChatGPT knows all of Wikipedia. If an answer could be found by extracting a passage from a Wikipedia article, ChatGPT will do a good job of answering it. Ask ChatGPT to do any engineering work, and it falls flat. It's poor mathematical skills and lack of ability to create complex plans mean that it is relying purely on it's coherent-sounding dialog.

You are perfect for HN.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is the same why should it be allowed? We want better answers not same shit or something even marginally worse

I'm asking what makes it worse.

Volume. Volume is the difference. It's so easy to generate an incorrect, but confident answer with ChatGPT that it makes it so much harder for SO provide a valuable service.

Re: Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banned

#80
post #35

I think the ban on ChatGPT answers on Stack Overflow is a mistake. Sure, some of the answers might not be correct, but that's true for any tool. And the fact that ChatGPT answers are easy to produce means that more people can contribute, which can only be a good thing for the community. Plus, it's not like the moderators have to accept every answer - they can still weed out the bad ones. Let's not punish everyone bec…

Going to be blunt... I'm kinda sick of this already

This pattern...

  
  
It was cute for like the first couple of times... Clever even...

But now the novelty is wearing thin and all I see are the fallacies inherent in trying to put this forward as some sort of argument/comment in favour of a viewpoint... because I'm still giving the commenter the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are trying to make a substantive contribution to the discussion.

- False Attribution (https://www.logicalfallacies.org/false-cause-and-false-attri...) almost universally at play since before the bait and switch they are attributing AI/ML blather for that of a genuine human's reasoning and opinion, revealing it was from the AI doesn't remove that. By virtue of posting it on your own account, there is the inherent presumption that its coming from the human who registered the account, and thus the false attribution.

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