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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

#51

Post by rafark »

isoprophlex wrote: post #5

I don't understand why you would, for the forseeable future, want to allow AI generated content on SO. Not with the current state of the art in generative AI. If I want an AI generated answer, with all the pros and cons specific to LLMs, I'll just open chatgpt or turn on copilot... SO answers (used to be) in an entirely different league in terms of trustworthiness. I'm totally on board with this moderator strike. Edi…

If the code works just fine, why remove it? For small algorithms it should be good enough.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#52

Post by aarong11 »

skilled wrote: post #13

It is most certainly a predicament. If people feel like they can freely post ChatGPT content, it adds enormous strain on making sure that the solution provided actually works. This then has to be done by moderators (with experience) or other users who land on the site. If it is the latter, people might get frustrated that answers are wrong, devaluing SO's value overall. In a nutshell, allowing AI in its current itera…

I mean people post wrong answers to stackoverflow all the time. They generally get downvoted.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#53

Post by kristofferR »

koochi10 wrote: post #37
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.…

How are they going to check for LLM usage?

I think it's way more likely that poor answers won't mention the usage of LLM's to generate the answer, while good answers aided by LLM's will more often mention it.

Punishing honesty just seems incredibly counterproductive.

Automatic detection is downright dystopian... being censored by an algorithm because it mistook my effort and work for a LLM.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#54

Post by Me1000 »

raincole wrote: post #25

I'd propose a different solution. For every single new question, auto-generate an answer with GPT and mark it as AI-generated.

At least the generated responses won’t start by asking me “why in the world would you want to do that?”

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#55

Post by jsheard »

koochi10 wrote: post #37
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.…

> This doesn't work at scale.

See also: the Clarkesworld saga of them being bombarded with mediocre AI-generated short stories. Filtering out bad submissions has always come with the territory, but they're suddenly drowning in them with the advent of LLMs which make it trivial to churn out vaguely story-shaped text on an industrial scale. The generated content isn't good by any measure, but it's "good enough" to pass the smell test and waste a curators time before they realise it has zero actual merit, and there's so much that it becomes a sisyphean task to sort through it.

Likewise with image generation, it's now incredibly easy to churn out images that look like something a person might make to express themselves, which are actually just a loosely guided slice through a statistical model of pre-existing images, passing the smell test for "good art" despite having zero actual intent or substance. It's spam, but for culture.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#56

Post by rpastuszak »

koochi10 wrote: post #37
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.…

Exactly, it’s not that useful if the answer I’m looking for exists on the platform but I can’t find it because of the signal vs. noise ratio. To me, usually, the context of the answer is more important than the answer text itself.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#57

Post by cosmolev »

dvt wrote: post #46
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.

There's this new trend of what I'll dub techno-nihilism , which is essentially a counterargument to the stochastic parrot argument. The former being: well what if WE are stochastic parrots, after all that's how we learn, right? Well yes, but actually no. It's trivially false because ChatGPT was trained on something (in this case, Stack Overflow), which, in turn was trained on something else (maybe a book), and so on.…

But there is also this idea that you can't judge the system while being a part of it. You simply can't see the whole picture.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#58

Post by Ukv »

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

Can answers be edited by the community to correct any hallucinations? Or is there just an outright ban on removing AI content?

There's no ban on removing AI content as far as I'm aware - admins just upped the evidence requirement for determining a post as AI-generated, seemingly in response to high false positive rates of hunches and current detectors:

> We recently performed a set of analyses on the current approach to AI-generated content moderation. The conclusions of these analyses strongly indicate to us that AI-generated content is not being properly identified across the network, and that the potential for false-positives is very high.

> In order to help mitigate the issue, we've asked moderators to apply a very strict standard of evidence to determining whether a post is AI-authored when deciding to suspend a user.

> We've reminded moderators that suspensions (and typically mod messages as well) are for real, verifiable malfeasance only, and should not be enacted on the basis of hunches, guesses, intuition, or unverified heuristics

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389582/what-is-the-...

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#59

Post by whatyesaid »

softwaredoug wrote: post #20

Before jumping to conclusions, be sure to check out this context: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389582/what-is-the-... TL; DR - the policy is “we can’t tell if something is AI generated, so hard to justify removal on just that basis.” > We recently performed a set of analyses on the current approach to AI-generated content moderation. The conclusions of these analyses strongly indicate to us that AI-genera…

I would've thought the problem is bots that are mass solving instead of human + ChatGPT.

If a bot mass solves you can identify it by posting frequency and quality over time.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#60

Post by dvt »

cosmolev wrote: post #57
dvt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this new trend of what I'll dub techno-nihilism , which is essentially a counterargument to the stochastic parrot argument. The former being: well what if WE are stochastic parrots, after all that's how we learn, right? Well yes, but actually no. It's trivially false because ChatGPT was trained on something (in this case, Stack Overflow), which, in turn was trained on something else (maybe a book), and so on.…

But there is also this idea that you can't judge the system while being a part of it. You simply can't see the whole picture.

True, but like solipsism or nihilism, those ideas are just not that interesting.
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