StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content • Hacker News Board

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#81

Post by pixl97 » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #73

Me1000 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? But more importantly banning AI generated content from Stack Overflow doesn’t solve the “problem” you’re describing.

> How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? Its an absurd equivalence. A human can never "dominate" no matter how much they learn. Training for free a closed, for-profit private enterprize infrastructure that will eventually make your preferred free collaboration platform obsolete is like the ultimate of naivete (or…

>A human can never "dominate" no matter how much they learn.

Somewhere an autocratic leader is laughing at you.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#82

Post by delecti » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:19 PM UTC

slowhadoken wrote: post #41

ChatGPT isn’t AI, I really wish people would stop calling it that. It tricks people into thinking something magical is happening. There is still only human generated content and ChatGPT scraped it.

"AI" is a moving target. As soon as techniques under the banner of "AI" start being used, they get a specific name and people start saying "that's not AI". For now, LLMs "are AI", just like current text-to-image models (Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc). There's no winning a terminology war single-handed.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#83

Post by Flimm » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #73

Me1000 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? But more importantly banning AI generated content from Stack Overflow doesn’t solve the “problem” you’re describing.

> How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? Its an absurd equivalence. A human can never "dominate" no matter how much they learn. Training for free a closed, for-profit private enterprize infrastructure that will eventually make your preferred free collaboration platform obsolete is like the ultimate of naivete (or…

All content on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA. So, in theory, the community could create a new Q&A website and import all the questions and answers from Stack Overflow. But that doesn't overcome the network effect, I admit.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#84

Post by fabian2k » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

Ukv wrote: post #80

fabian2k wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially a ban on removing AI content, the cases where it is still allowed to remove the posts are exceedingly rare. This is rather confusing as the public policy doesn't contain those details. I'm a moderator on a small SE site, so I have seen the internal communication between SE and the mods on this.

> This is essentially a ban on removing AI content I think framing it as "a ban on removing AI content" is wrong/misleading and the reason for softwaredoug's question about whether you'd even be allowed to edit low-quality hallucinations. To my understanding you can still remove/edit/ban for all the same reasons as normal content, just that the additional reason (removing for inherently being AI generated) is now sig…

This gets into the particulars of how moderation on SO usually works. Posts are only deleted for low quality when they are really terrible. Most bad posts are handled by downvoting by the community, no mods involved. Deciding which posts are bad very often requires domain knowledge, which the mods can't have for every possible topic on SO.

SE dropped this new policy on monday, a holiday and it went into effect immediately. They never even mentioned before that they were concerned about false positives here. They could have just asked the mods, explained the concerns and asked them to be more careful. That never happened.

The new policy isn't just erring towards avoiding false positives, it is far more extreme than that and prevents almost all cases of AI-generated content from being moderated.

There are other concerns like e.g. especially academic sites are strict about considering the use of AI-generated content without declaring it to be plagiarism. Acting on that is now impossible.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#85

Post by Taek » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #55

koochi10 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This seems like a problem you can only solve with an invite or credential system. If you are an invited writer (or have some sort of literary degree) you can submit content, otherwise you gotta let people invite you. AI content is still allowed, and if you post garbage you lose your posting privileges.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#86

Post by Me1000 » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:25 PM UTC

nologic01 wrote: post #73

Me1000 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? But more importantly banning AI generated content from Stack Overflow doesn’t solve the “problem” you’re describing.

> How is that any different than providing free labor to help someone learn how to build the next [X] so that they can more effectively dominate? Its an absurd equivalence. A human can never "dominate" no matter how much they learn. Training for free a closed, for-profit private enterprize infrastructure that will eventually make your preferred free collaboration platform obsolete is like the ultimate of naivete (or…

It's not really an equivalence, if you remove the sensationalism, it's just a point that the free work is already being provided.

Put more succinctly I'm making two points: 1) The free work is already being done. 2) StackOverflow has been crawl-able since forever.

You'd have to address both of those problems before the concern that you're raising becomes relevant. Banning the posting of new generated content doesn't address either of those things.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#87

Post by Dowwie » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

Some people use their StackOverflow karma for social credit and portfolio. Their karma won't have the same value as it did before AI-generated responses were allowed. I think that comments should be approved but zero karma applied for providing the correct response using AI. There won't be an incentive to provide AI generated responses, but they won't be rejected either.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#88

Post by bastawhiz » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

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.

In practice this isn't possible. Lots of accepted answers are bad. Often for subtle reasons! An answer with a SQL injection vulnerability might get plenty of upvotes and be accepted, but it's objectively bad (even if it answers the question).

The problem is that there is no AI that's accurately fixing answers. AI only generates mediocre answers, it doesn't have the capacity to moderate mediocre answers. Humans simply can't keep up, or don't have the acumen to pick up on the subtle inaccuracies in accepted-but-bad answers (after all, that's often why they're looking for the answer).

Even with protections like rate limiting, I'm not sure you could prevent the majority of the damage that crappy AI can accomplish. Simply paying (pennies) for proxy servers with residential IPs gets around much of that, anyway.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#89

Post by pixl97 » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

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.…

At the sametime I think you may be overvaluing new answers and the importance of reiterating known answers in a method the user asking the question understands.

For example, there is no intrinsic value in something new. If I take a new solution to a problem, lock it in a box, then it has zero value. It is not improving anyway.

Now, if I take a solution and present it to you in a manner that you can understand, that has an inherent value to the end user.

By this analogy attempting to say that LLMs are useless because they only know what already exists is far to harsh of measure because the vast volume of human output is rehashing what we already know.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#90

Post by JdeBP » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 6:47 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #85

jsheard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This seems like a problem you can only solve with an invite or credential system. If you are an invited writer (or have some sort of literary degree) you can submit content, otherwise you gotta let people invite you. AI content is still allowed, and if you post garbage you lose your posting privileges.

Has that observably worked for Citizendium or lobste.rs, which have tried exactly that for years, though? Have they been widely recognized as superior to Wikipedia and Hacker News? Have they in fact been widely recognized?

If your answer is that Wikipedia and Hacker News still get the recognition and haven't collapsed, then I suggest that there are already examples to learn from that the same idea for Stack Exchange won't work.