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StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

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Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#31

Post by endisneigh »

cosmolev wrote: post #21
dlivingston wrote: post #7

What's the motivation for Stack Overflow to allow AI-generated content in the first place? These AI models were likely heavily trained on SO data, so any LLM-based answer is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers before it. In addition, asking a question on Stack Overflow and having some LLM respond seems to me like the equivalent of asking GPT-X.Y directly, albeit with extra steps.

There is a possibility that everything we output is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers, ideas, and thoughts we have encountered before. Including this comment of yours. And mine.

I hate this sort of retort since it’s fundamentally meaningless. All atoms that will ever exist were in the singularity and exploded during the big bang to encompass all of the universe, and so we are all just moving along. Ok, so what.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#32

Post by raman162 »

crazygringo wrote: post #17

Either answers are good or not. It doesn't matter if they're generated by a 13-year-old in their bedroom, someone studying CS at university, a well-respected IC at a top tech company... or an AI. If answers are good, keep them. If they're bad, downvote them. If they're redundant or off-topic or gibberish, delete them. And to those asking why you would ever want AI-generated content on StackOverflow when you could jus…

Agreed. I have found myself sometimes asking Chat-GPT for guidance related to obscure error messages and occasionally its more useful than google or stack overflow.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#33

Post by jatins »

8note wrote: post #22
isoprophlex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, A) they might not be, B) once we start mixing human answers with AI on SO, it's value as a data source for future LLM train runs will decrease. The tech is moving at breakneck pace, and in general I'm loving it. But let's not hurry the adoption of AI too much

For B, SO still has voting on answers as well as acceptance of answers It's not as valuable as raw text input, but it's still marked up and classified

> SO still has voting on answers

We call it RLHF these days

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#34

Post by nologic01 »

crazygringo wrote: post #17

Either answers are good or not. It doesn't matter if they're generated by a 13-year-old in their bedroom, someone studying CS at university, a well-respected IC at a top tech company... or an AI. If answers are good, keep them. If they're bad, downvote them. If they're redundant or off-topic or gibberish, delete them. And to those asking why you would ever want AI-generated content on StackOverflow when you could jus…

> If answers are good, keep them. If they're bad, downvote them. If they're redundant or off-topic or gibberish, delete them.

Yeah, lets us keep providing free labor to help train somebody else's models, improve somebody else's infrastructure so that they can even more effectively dominate.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#35

Post by [deleted] »

endisneigh wrote: post #31
cosmolev wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a possibility that everything we output is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers, ideas, and thoughts we have encountered before. Including this comment of yours. And mine.

I hate this sort of retort since it’s fundamentally meaningless. All atoms that will ever exist were in the singularity and exploded during the big bang to encompass all of the universe, and so we are all just moving along. Ok, so what.

[deleted]

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#36

Post by gtirloni »

w0ts0n wrote: post #16

We talk about job disruption, GPT has SO's number. They should have never shut their job board. They have painted themselves into a tiny corner now and OpenAI + others are coming for their lunch.

LLMs will usually lag a lot though. Often a human has more up to date knowledge. Computers being such an active and ever changing field, that matters. OpenAI should want people to keep contributing original answers to feed its AI.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#37

Post by koochi10 »

crazygringo wrote: post #17

Either answers are good or not. It doesn't matter if they're generated by a 13-year-old in their bedroom, someone studying CS at university, a well-respected IC at a top tech company... or an AI. If answers are good, keep them. If they're bad, downvote them. If they're redundant or off-topic or gibberish, delete them. And to those asking why you would ever want AI-generated content on StackOverflow when you could jus…

This doesn't work at scale. Stack overflow as a platform has been handling user generated input via moderators, voting, and testing. This is fine when there are only 26.8 million coders on the planet, most of which aren't posting on stack overflow regularly. With LLM's all of a sudden there is a huge influx of mediocre content on the platform that people can't handle. Inevitably this will erode trust in the platform. When someone posts a answer I assume they actually ran the code, and can verify the result. LLM's can spit out seemingly correct code that just doesn't work.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#38

Post by joshuanapoli »

dlivingston wrote: post #7

What's the motivation for Stack Overflow to allow AI-generated content in the first place? These AI models were likely heavily trained on SO data, so any LLM-based answer is merely a regurgitation of thousands of human answers before it. In addition, asking a question on Stack Overflow and having some LLM respond seems to me like the equivalent of asking GPT-X.Y directly, albeit with extra steps.

I'd guess that valid human-authored submissions were being rejected by moderators because they appeared to the moderator to be AI-authored. Moreover, there is probably a significant grey area where a human selects among multiple AI answers and refines them.

As a user of Stack Overflow answers, I don't care too much about who the author was. I do value the voting, comments and community on Stack Overflow, since they add confidence and color to an answer.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#39

Post by Veen »

People here are arguing about whether it’s ok to have AI-generated content on StackOverflow or not. But it seems to me that’s not the issue. The real issue is that people suck at identifying AI content, and so do AI detectors. So moderation based on that identification is obviously going to be unfair and inaccurate. Moderators are removing perfectly acceptable human-written answers based on their spurious intuition that it’s AI generated, and they are striking because they want to go on doing so.

It doesn’t matter how confident moderators are that they can identity AI content when the correlation between their confidence and reality is so low.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#40

Post by kristopolous »

koheripbal wrote: post #6

Why? If the answers are good, leave them.

Because the system isn't confirming the answers.

Let's assume we have the final form AGI. If it doesn't confirm the claims are accurate then it falls under the same flaw as humans who don't confirm.

If it's a bunch of untested, unconfirmed results that are statistically pretty decent, this doesn't really reduce the amount of work.

That is the same misplaced enthusiasm that developers tend to do when they fetishize new tools or languages which actually make their job more complicated and time consuming but occupy the time in a way that gives illusory optics to the contrary.

The fact that most devs get fooled by such productivity illusions are why 10x engineer are a real thing.

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