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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

#51

Post by mikepurvis »

david-gpu wrote: post #25
lordgrenville wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a user, why would I care whether an answer is "incorrect" or "hallucinated"? Neither one is going to solve the problem I have at hand. It sounds like a distinction without a difference.

Obviously there are exceptions but human-wrong answers tend to be more subtly wrong whereas hallucinated answers are just baffling and nonsensical.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#52

Post by AlexandrB »

jncfhnb wrote: post #35
optimiz3 wrote: post #15

If a site aims to commoditize shared expertise, royalties should be paid. Why would anyone willingly reduce their earning power, let alone hand away the right for someone else to profit from selling their knowledge, unattributed no less. Best bet is to book publish, and require a license from anyone that wants to train on it.

Because it’s a marginal effect on your earning power and it’s a nice thing to do.

"It's a nice thing to do" never seems to sway online platforms to treat their users better. This kind of asymmetry seems to only ever go one way.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#53

Post by simonw »

optimiz3 wrote: post #15

If a site aims to commoditize shared expertise, royalties should be paid. Why would anyone willingly reduce their earning power, let alone hand away the right for someone else to profit from selling their knowledge, unattributed no less. Best bet is to book publish, and require a license from anyone that wants to train on it.

... you just shared your expertise here on Hacker News in the form of this comment without any expectation of royalties. How is posting on StackOverflow different?

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#54

Post by johannes1234321 »

optimiz3 wrote: post #21
afh1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why open source anything, let alone with permissive licensing, right?

To a degree, yes. I only open source work where I expect reciprocal value from other contributions.

There is a lot of indirect hardly measurable value one can gain.

Going back to the original source: By giving an answer to somebody on a Q&A site, they might be a kid learning and then building solutions I benefit from later, again. Similar with software.

And I also consider the total gain of knowledge for our society at large a gain.

While my marginal cost form many things is low. And often lower than a cost-benefit calculation.

And some Q&A questions strike a nerve and are interesting to me to answer (be it in thinking about the problem or in trying to boiling it down to a good answer), similar to open source. Some programming tasks as fun problems to solve, that's a gain, and then sharing the result cost me nothing.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#55

Post by PhilipRoman »

melenaboija wrote: post #38

It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.

I haven't really found stackoverflow to be that humiliating (compared to some IRC rooms or forums), basic questions get asked and answered all the time. But the worst part is when you want to do something off the beaten path.

Q: how do I do thing X in C?

A: Why do you need to know this? The C standard doesn't say anything about X. The answer will depend on your compiler and platform. Are you sure you want to do X instead Y? What version of Ubuntu are you running?

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#56

Post by bryanrasmussen »

jeremyjh wrote: post #36
rkncland wrote: post #26

Of course people reduce their free contributions to Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is selling then out with the OpenAI API agreement and countless "AI" hype blog posts.

I think this is more about a drop in questions, than a drop in answers.

I mean part of the reason to not ask about stuff on SO, there are several types of questions that one might like to ask - such as:

I don't know the first thing about this thing, help me get to where I know the first thing. This is not allowed any more.

I want to know the pros and cons of various things compared. this is not allowed.

I have quality questions regarding an approach that I know how to do, but I want to know better ways. This is generally not allowed but you might slip through if you ask it just right.

I pretty much know really well what I'm doing but having some difficulty finding the right documentation on some little thing,help me - this is allowe

Something does not work as per the documentation, help me, this is allowed

I think I have done everything right but it is not working, this is allowed and is generally a typo or something that you have put in the wrong order because you're tired.

At any rate, the ones that are not allowed are the only questions that are worth asking.

The last two that is allowed I generally find gets answered in the asking - I'm pretty good in the field I'm asking in, the rigor of making something match SO question requirements leads me to the answer.

If I ask one of the interesting disallowed questions and get shit on then I will probably go through a period of screw it, I will just look extra hard for the documentation before I bother with that site again.

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#57

Post by LeadB »

melenaboija wrote: post #38

It’s been a relief to find a platform where I can ask questions without the fear of being humiliated Half joking, but I am pretty tired of SO pedantry.

For the major programming languages, it must be a pretty esoteric question if it does not have an answer yet.

Increasingly, the free products of experts are stolen from them with the pretext that "users need to be protected". Entire open source projects are stolen by corporations and the experts are removed using the CoC wedge.

Now SO answers are stolen because the experts are not trained like hotel receptionists (while being short of time and unpaid).

I'm sure that the corporations who steal are very polite and CoC compliant, and when they fire all developers once an AGI is developed, the firing notices will be in business speak, polite, express regret and wish you all the best in your future endeavors!

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#59

Post by verdverm »

andrepd wrote: post #33
benfortuna wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is antithetical to the idea of Open Source. If you expect contributions then pay a bounty, don't pretend.

GPL is antithetical to open source? Odd take

There is a permissionless (MIT) vs permissioned (GPL) difference that is at the heart of the debate of what society thinks open source should mean

Re: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms

#60

Post by skydhash »

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #46
jmyeet wrote: post #5

It'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 l…

> You may have read hundres of books in your life, maybe even thousands. You haven't read a million. You don't need to. Sometimes online forums are the only place where you can find solutions for niche situations and edge cases. Tricks which would have been very difficult to figure out on your own. LLMs can train on the official documentation of tools l/libraries but they can't experiment and figure out solutions to…

> Sometimes online forums are the only place where you can find solutions for niche situations and edge cases.

That's the most valuable aspect of it. When you find yourself in these niches situations, it's nice when you see someone has encountered it and has done the legwork to solve it, saving you hours and days. And that's why Wikis like the Arch Wiki are important. You need people to document the system, not just individual components.

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