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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

#101

Post by rich_sasha »

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…

I guess the premise is that it is easier to identify AI-generated content, with a low hit rate (?) of correctness, than to identify correct / incorrect answers based on merit alone.

Also StackOverflow is kind of gamified (a rare case of it working IMHO) and the rules of the game don't work so well when kind of good looking content is easy to generate. SE answers are hard to verify but easy to write. If writing becomes too easy, it is a recipe for spam - as has indeed happened.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#103

Post by kristopolous »

pixl97 wrote: post #92
kristopolous wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the system isn't confirming the answers. Let's assume we have the final form AGI. If it doesn't confirm the claims are accurate then it falls under the same flaw as humans who don't confirm. If it's a bunch of untested, unconfirmed results that are statistically pretty decent, this doesn't really reduce the amount of work. That is the same misplaced enthusiasm that developers tend to do when they fetishize ne…

>Because the system isn't confirming the answers. Do we have any evidence that users confirm the answers? In general the conformation is in the end users following up and saying this works/doesn't work. Now, this gets more problematic when 'bots' follow up and says it works, but that is going to be a massive problem in detecting that's the case unless they are doing it far more than a human could.

> Do we have any evidence that users confirm the answers?

No.

> In general the conformation is in the end users following up and saying this works/doesn't work.

I guess.

The point is there's a limit to the trustworthiness of the results and if I'm going there to fix a problem, the success rate I'm looking for is 100%, especially if it's said as confidently and verbosely as these AIs seem to be

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#106

Post by shagie »

crazygringo wrote: post #72
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.…

Again, you can handle this by rate-limiting and standard anti-abuse measures. To elaborate: don't allow new-ish accounts to post more than one question/answer per day, don't allow allow accounts to more than one question/answer per week/month if their previous content hasn't reached a certain quality threshold of votes, and so forth. It's entirely possible to set up the system to prevent it from being flooded by cont…

This works in theory, if people abide by it.

However, in practice this sort of approach would likely mean people who don't have anything invested (especially new users) would create multiple accounts to be able to post multiple times.

Rate limiting only works well if there's a stickiness that makes changing accounts more difficult than waiting out the rate limit.

---

While Stack Overflow was set up to handle moderation, the culture evolved to one that disdained any appearance of gate keeping, preservation of any attempt to answer, and that moderation and curation actions on a post were personal attacks on the individual who wrote it.

As tooling was taken away from community moderation and curation it became harder and harder to maintain quality. Additionally, the rule of 90-9-1 (aka The Rule of Participation Inequality - https://www.grazitti.com/blog/the-90-9-1-rule-is-over-its-ti... ) applied to people who are doing moderation and curating means that once it scales above a certain point it becomes impractical if not impossible to curate all of the incoming material.

A little more tweaking may have been possible a decade ago. However, both the culture of people asking questions and the corporate "engagement first" approach have made being a person trying to curate the material fighting against the tide.

There are 3.3k questions that have had a close vote cast that need more people to review them. There have been only 313 reviews today as I write this ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats ). And that's ignoring the countless thousands of reviews that have timed out.

    year close tasks
    2016     581,204 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/340815
    2017     .......
    2018     440,336 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/378415
    2019     318,431 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/392550
    2020     225,745 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/404558
    2021     213,104 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/415250
    2022      96,495 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/422885
A trend with community moderation is clearly visible and likely too far to be corrected with tweaking.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#107

Post by shagie »

8note wrote: post #22
isoprophlex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, A) they might not be, B) once we start mixing human answers with AI on SO, it's value as a data source for future LLM train runs will decrease. The tech is moving at breakneck pace, and in general I'm loving it. But let's not hurry the adoption of AI too much

For B, SO still has voting on answers as well as acceptance of answers It's not as valuable as raw text input, but it's still marked up and classified

Consider the answer to the question "how often do people down vote incorrect information?"

While SO still has voting, the value of a vote in terms of identifying correct information has fallen off substantially in the past several years. Poorly written questions and incorrect answers are more likely to get an upvote for trying than a down vote for what's actually written.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#108

Post by wordcloudsare »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #50

Anyone around who moderators on SO? Is there a general sense of alienation from corporate SO? My understanding is that in the early days, a lot of the devs at SO were actually recruited from the SO and Meta moderation userbase but probably that doesn't scale. Example: Ben: And then, April 29th, I was, again, sitting in the agency, doing my thing, and I also had my personal email open, and I suddenly got an email from…

Not a mod but mods have complained publicly about the sense of isolation for years

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#109

Post by NotTheDr01ds »

pixl97 wrote: post #79
yyyk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If answers are good, keep them. If they're bad, downvote them. >This doesn't work at scale... with LLM's all of a sudden there is a huge influx of mediocre content The GP's answer may not work at scale - however LLM detection doesn't work at all. So the only semi-workable solution is aggressive filtering and banning users who post trash (LLM or not). Also, there's a need to think about score and trust mechanisms -…

Yep, and if you aggressively ban bots/LLM content, then you'll see everyone accuse and report each other for said content even if it's good content. For example here on HN we have a rule if you see bot content you don't mention it in the thread. You report it and let the admins decide. Anything else just turns into flamewars.

And there's the problem on SO. Previously, we could do exactly that - Flag the content for a Mod to review. Now Mods are pretty much prevented from taking any action when we (the community members) and they believe it is a bot.

I saw one user yesterday post 10 lengthy, detailed answers in an hour, in 3 different programming languages. But the Mods aren't allowed by SE to consider that (or pretty much anything) to be an indicator that it's AI-generated.

Re: StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content

#110

Post by wordcloudsare »

Veen wrote: post #39

People here are arguing about whether it’s ok to have AI-generated content on StackOverflow or not. But it seems to me that’s not the issue. The real issue is that people suck at identifying AI content, and so do AI detectors. So moderation based on that identification is obviously going to be unfair and inaccurate. Moderators are removing perfectly acceptable human-written answers based on their spurious intuition t…

Any one tool is bad at detecting AI but combining both human intuition and multiple automatic tools can get a very accurate result. Moderators already only make suspensions when multiple systems agree.

Not to mention the best AI might be hard to distinguish but most AI content is quite obvious (when reading carefully) because how bad it is. It can trick a casual reader but not a experienced moderator who knows about the subject matter.

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