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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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tastes quite like chicken initially, but lacks any sauce, or variability. You soon crave a piece that has some novel texture.

Have you ever tasted a wild chicken?

It's not like that.

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

#132
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slight correction: ChatGPT will PROBABLY do a good job of answering factual questions. It still sometimes hallucinates even when asking known facts, thus it inherently can't be trusted.

Yeah, but this is a problem where I can think of plausible solutions without hand-waving radical AI advancements.

For a factual claim, it could look at each sentence and see if the equivalent information exists on Wikipedia, or another online source, or even a book. And then link to that source. Google has already digested all that information, so it's just a matter of finding clever ways to connect them.

I don't think it would ever be flawless, but it could be turned into an extremely capable research assistant.

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

#134
post #105
post #65

Yet another example of AI driving us back to analogue. There's no obvious way of identifying AI content on StackOverflow, and there's a financial imperative to having a high score on there. So one would expect it to get gamed into oblivion with bots. Once that's happened, there ceases to be any social payoff in posting tech info on the net. And so we end of hoarding knowledge and training people in person.

Interesting thought. But what makes you think that it won't be good enough for the majority of people? To some extent, online-only bootcamps are already good enough for a large crowd of devs, while others went to universities and labs to get a much more in depth education.

People remember bad experiences much more than good ones, so if half of the answers on website look reasonable but do not work, the overall impression would be "website with garbage answers"

And it seems that AI has much more than 50% answers wrong.

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

#135
post #134
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought. But what makes you think that it won't be good enough for the majority of people? To some extent, online-only bootcamps are already good enough for a large crowd of devs, while others went to universities and labs to get a much more in depth education.

People remember bad experiences much more than good ones, so if half of the answers on website look reasonable but do not work, the overall impression would be "website with garbage answers" And it seems that AI has much more than 50% answers wrong.

Even 20% wrong answers probably = "website with garbage answers".

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

#136
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 cont…

I think this is a good point, but misses the benefit of causing us to question everything posted and read all comments with a hint of skepticism about the motivations of the poster. Is what they posted correct? Are they shaping data to serve their own conclusions? Is it a robot who's purpose is to destroy humanity? The last one is obviously a joke and you shouldn't jump to a conclusion like that.

- Written by a real human, I promise

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

#137
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played with ChatGPT today. It doesn't replace Google or SO today, and based on the types of issues with what it generated, ChatGPT is not going to replace a competent programmer any time soon. Where I fear you might be right though, is that the web in general (and so, Google) and sites like SO with their internal content, will inevitably lose value as people post ChatGPT-generated content which superficially looks…

I woke up today and decided to ask ChatGPT something instead of Googling it. It worked perfectly for my query. A version of ChatGPT that has access to the web (can crawl, can link to content) will be a big blow for google.

A version of ChatGPT with internet access that can crawl the web and link things is fundamentally different to the version that exists today.

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

#139
I will definitely say that ChatGPT comes up with really good combination of words that can coherently stick together. But, it should be understood that "we" make sense from the sentence it generates, not the Chat software itself, it is just stringing together words based on the patterns it has learnt.

If answering a question was all about generating the correct subsequent/pattern of words based on prior context or prompts, then we can argue that sales consultant, marketing personnel, journalists etc can write and design software or come up with scientific theories? After all, they also can use buzz words they have learnt contextually very well and hence they sell the product, isn't it?

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

#140
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…

I think they should have a flag or something so you can self-identify the post as made by GPT so people can compare/contrast what it's capable of. Missed opportunity imho.
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