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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

#121

Post by wwweston »

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.

When the jobs side of SO was active, it effectively did this. Strong answers and scoring were compensated with prospective employer attention. For a few years, this was actually where the majority of my new job leads came from. It was a pretty rewarding ecosystem, though not without its problems.

Not sure why they shut down jobs; they recently brought back a poorer version of it.

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

#122

Post by atomic128 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #106
atomic128 wrote: post #82

Eventually, large language models will be the end of open source. That's ok, just accept it. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) th…

Why wouldn’t you use LLMs to write even more open source? The cost of contributions falls dramatically, eg, $100 is 200M tokens of GPT-3.5; so you’re talking enough to spend 10,000 tokens developing each line of a 20kloc project (amortized). That’s a moderate project for a single donation and an afternoon of managing a workflow framework.

What you're describing is "open slop", and yes, there will be a lot of it.

Open source as we know it today, not so much.

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

#123

Post by grogenaut »

wokwokwok wrote: post #109
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but the funny thing is, the only people I've ever seen complain about SO are people who don't know how to search.

Everyone has a pet theory about what’s wrong with SO; but here’s the truth: Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working. Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man. That is a sinking ship. If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search. Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform. That’s…

I get good answers all the time on SO or used to. My problem is that I've been down voted several times for "stupid question" and also been down voted for not knowing what I was talking about in an area I'm an expert in.

I had one question that was a bit odd and went against testing dogma that I had a friend post. He pulled it 30 minutes later as he was already down 30 votes. It was a thing that's not best practice in most cases but also in certain situations the only way to do it. Like when you're testing apis you don't control.

In some sections people also want textbook or better quality answers from random strangers on the internet.

The final part is that you at least used to have to build up a lot of karma to be able to post effectively or at all in some sections or be seen. Which is very catch 22.

So it can be both very useful and very sh*t.

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

#124

Post by barbecue_sauce »

wokwokwok wrote: post #109
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but the funny thing is, the only people I've ever seen complain about SO are people who don't know how to search.

Everyone has a pet theory about what’s wrong with SO; but here’s the truth: Whatever they’re doing, it isn’t working. Blame mods. Blame AI. Blame askers… whatever man. That is a sinking ship. If you don’t see people complain about SO, it’s because they aren’t using it, not because they’re using the search. Pretty hard to argue at this point that the problem is with the users being too shit to use the platform. That’s…

But what problem is there with it? Most of the important questions have been answered already.

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

#125

Post by mycall »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #120

The problem is eventually what are LLMs going’s to draw from? They’re not creating new information, just regurgitating and combining existing info. That’s why they perform so poorly on code for which there aren’t many many publicly available samples, SO/reddit answers etc.

I thought synthetic data is what is partially training the new multimodal large models, i.e. AlphaGeometry, o1, etc.

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

#126

Post by jneagu »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #120

The problem is eventually what are LLMs going’s to draw from? They’re not creating new information, just regurgitating and combining existing info. That’s why they perform so poorly on code for which there aren’t many many publicly available samples, SO/reddit answers etc.

Edit: OP had actually qualified their statement to refer to only underrepresented coding languages. That's 100% true - LLM coding performance is super biased in favor of well-represented languages, esp. in public repos.

Interesting - I actually think they perform quite well on code, considering that code has a set of correct answers (unlike most other tasks we use LLMs for on a daily basis). GitHub Copilot had a 30%+ acceptance rate (https://github.blog/news-insights/research/research-quantify...). How often does one accept the first answer that ChatGPT returns?

To answer your first question: new content is still being created in an LLM-assisted way, and a lot of it can be quite good. The rate of that happening is a lot lower than that of LLM-generated spam - this is the concerning part.

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

#127

Post by mrkramer »

tlogan wrote: post #67
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.

The main issue with Stack Overflow (and similar public Q&A platforms) is that many contributors do not know what they do not know, leading to inaccurate answers. Additionally, these platforms tend to attract a fair amount of spam (self promotion etc) which can make it very hard to find high-quality responses.

>The main issue with Stack Overflow (and similar public Q&A platforms) is that many contributors do not know what they do not know, leading to inaccurate answers.

The best Q&A platform would be the one where experts and scientists answer questions but sites like Wikipedia and Reddit showed that broad range of audience can also be pretty good at providing useful information and moderating it.

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

#128

Post by aezart »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #96
kajaktum wrote: post #95

I have no idea where to ask questions nowadays. Stackoverflow is way "too slow" (Go to website, write a nice well formatted thread, wait for answers). But there's way faster solutions now, namely from message groups. For example, I was wondering if its okay to move my home directory to a different filesystem altogether and create a symlink from /home/. Where do I ask such questions? The freaking ZFS mailing list? SO?…

I guess I'm out of the loop. What does "/g/" mean?

It's the technology message board on 4chan, each board has a name like that. /a/ for anime, /v/ for video games, etc.

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

#130

Post by simonw »

vlovich123 wrote: post #76
simonw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the "count the Rs in strawberry" and the "multiply two large numbers" things have been solved for over a year now by the tool usage pattern: give an LLM the ability to delegate to a code execution environment for things it's inherently bad at and train it how to identify when to use that option.

I think the point is that playing whack a mole is an effective practical strategy to shore up individual weaknesses (or even classes of weaknesses) but that doesn’t get you to general reasoning unless you think that intelligence evolved this way. Given the adaptability of intelligence across the animal kingdom to novel environments never seen before, I don’t think that can be anything other than a short term strategy…

Sure, LLMs won't ever get to general reasoning (for pick your definition of "reasoning") unassisted.

I think that adding different forms of assistance remains the most interesting pattern right now.

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