Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
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Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#2Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#3Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
The answer by humans is a) publicly accessible b) hallucination-free (although it still may not be correct) c) subject to a voting process which gives a good signal of how much we should trust it.
Which makes me think, maybe a good move for Stack Overflow (which does not allow the submission of LLM-generated answers, wisely imo) would be to add an AI agent that would suggest an answer for each question, that people could vote on. That way you can elicit human and machine answers, and still have the verification process.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#4Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
The answer by humans is a) publicly accessible b) hallucination-free (although it still may not be correct) c) subject to a voting process which gives a good signal of how much we should trust it. Which makes me think, maybe a good move for Stack Overflow (which does not allow the submission of LLM-generated answers, wisely imo) would be to add an AI agent that would suggest an answer for each question, that people c…
It's a good idea but probably not easy to implement. SO answers are usually quite neat, like an email. Solving a problem with ChatGPT is more like ... chat. It's hard to turn it into something googlable and Google is how SO gets most of its traffic and utility.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#5It's a losing battle to try and maintain walled gardens for these corpuses of human-generated text that have become valuable to train LLMs. The horse has probably already bolted.
I see this as a temporary problem however because LLMs are transitional. At some point it won't be necessary to train an LLM on the entirety of Reddit plus everything else ever written because there are obvious limits to statistical models like this and, as a counter point, that's not how humans learn. You may have read hundres of books in your life, maybe even thousands. You haven't read a million. You don't need to.
I find it interesting that this issue (which is theft, to be clear) is being framed as theft from the site or company that "owns" that data, rather than theft from the users who created it. All these user-generated content ("UGC") sites are doomed to eventually fail because their motivations diverge from their users and the endless quest to increase profits inevitably drives users away.
Another issue is how much IP consumption constitutes theft? If an LLM watches every movie ever made, that's probably theft. But how many is too many? Like Apocalypse Now was loosely based on or at least inspired by Heart of Darkness (the novel). Yet you can't accuse a human of "theft" by reading Heart of Darkness.
All art is derivative, as they say.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#6Well, if the users ask frequent/common questions to ChatGPT and get acceptable answers, is this even a problem? If the volume of duplicate questions decreases, there should be no bad influence on the training data, right?
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#7Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
The answer by humans is a) publicly accessible b) hallucination-free (although it still may not be correct) c) subject to a voting process which gives a good signal of how much we should trust it. Which makes me think, maybe a good move for Stack Overflow (which does not allow the submission of LLM-generated answers, wisely imo) would be to add an AI agent that would suggest an answer for each question, that people c…
LLMs are much better experience on the "Q side". Sure, there's the occasional hallucination here and there, but QnA sites are not all StackOverflow. Most of them are just content farms for SEO and advertising purposes - meaning, the veracity of the content doesn't matter, as long as it's driving clicks. At this moment, this makes LLMs much more trustworthy.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#8Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#9Stackoverflow mods and power users being arseholes reduces the use of Stackoverflow. ChatGPT is just the first viable alternative.
While not exactly the same wording, this was my also first thought.
There have been two places that I remember where arrogance of the esoterati drive two feedback cycles:
1. People leave after seeking help for an issue they believed needed the input of masters.
2. Because of gruff treatment, the masters receive complaints and indignation, triggering a backfire effect feedback loop, often under the guise of said masters not wanting to be overwhelmed by common problems and issues.
There is a few practical things that can help with this (clear guides to point to, etc.), but the missing element is kindness / non-judgmental responsiveness.
Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
#10Don't they just reduce the Q part of Q&A? And since the Q was A-d by AI doesn't that mean that A was there already and people just couldn't find it but AI did?
The answer by humans is a) publicly accessible b) hallucination-free (although it still may not be correct) c) subject to a voting process which gives a good signal of how much we should trust it. Which makes me think, maybe a good move for Stack Overflow (which does not allow the submission of LLM-generated answers, wisely imo) would be to add an AI agent that would suggest an answer for each question, that people c…
Why a vote? Voting != Verification.