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Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

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Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#271

Post by acjacobson »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50
senko wrote: post #7

This is just a preview of things to come. Wait a few weeks until Google is completely swamped with ChatGPT SEO pages barely distinguishable from the real thing. If I worked at search quality at Google, I'd be very worried.

I expect Google to be irrelevant soon enough. ChatGPT already does a better job of finding answers to a lot of technical questions than Google.

If I were Google this is what I would actually be worried about. I ask ChatGPT a typical question and I get a clear short answer.

I ask Google the same thing have to wade through a 1000 line blog post talking about 25 other things to finally find the one piece of information I need.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#272

Post by wizeman »

tartoran wrote: post #239
unethical_ban wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI we see today is a synthesis of a huge number of arbitrary inputs. You may argue that humans are, as well, but humans are different machine than AI. If I am asking for a human response, or a human piece of artwork, I am doing so because I want to understand and experience the output of machines of the same model. I want to continue the human experience. AI-generated content can be fascinating, helpful, and in s…

Get ready to see a lot of human spaces invaded by somebody elses AI with goals that are not in your interest. It’s been happening already with chatbots pulled by strings by nefarious people but that operation will only amplify to a point that it will become cumbersome and hard to know whether you’re chatting or reading something that came from a human or language model. To me internet comments are almost on life supp…

Interestingly, the same thing has been happening with reviews of products, although usually they are written by humans that are paid to write those (extremely biased, mostly deceitful) reviews. I mean, just look at many Amazon review comments... or even of commercial establishments on Google Maps and many other such places that accept user-generated reviews of commercial products.

> To me internet comments are almost on life support. Im curious if HN will have the same fate

I think I agree, in general.

I wonder what incentives someone could have for posting such comments on HN. I mean, it's clear that commercial products could benefit immensely from that (as they'd get a return on their investment), and also e.g. governments and political parties who might want to influence the public discourse about sensitive/political matters.

But why would anyone (who is not toxic already) use such a bot to post comments about technical topics, such as in discussions about programming languages, interesting bugs being discovered, open-source software being released, etc?

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#273

Post by yrgulation »

senko wrote: post #7

This is just a preview of things to come. Wait a few weeks until Google is completely swamped with ChatGPT SEO pages barely distinguishable from the real thing. If I worked at search quality at Google, I'd be very worried.

People have been using something similar for more than a decade. I know of a guy using tools to generate seo content for his 2k+ websites since around 2010. His work just got a lot easier.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#274

Post by l0b0 »

hxugufjfjf wrote: post #2

Any examples?

I'm wondering whether the @Troppen answers to [1] are AI-generated:

- Posted from a new account 8 minutes after I posted the question.

- Clippy-style "It looks like you're trying to […]" intro.

- Zero formatting on the initial answer; minimal formatting on the follow-up answer.

- Specifically suggests an option I had explicitly disregarded in my question.

- Both answers suggest non-working code.

- "Let me know if you have any further questions", a completely inappropriate finisher on a site like SO.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/q/74681399/96588

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#275

Post by l0b0 »

KomoD wrote: post #208

I just encountered this, 2 users[1][2] it's very obvious as well since you can see the reputation spike from basically nothing. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/19192614/boatti?tab=topactiv... [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/20684429/a-s?tab=topactivity

That's not suspicious, getting ~130 reputation in a day is not at all unusual.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#276

Post by l0b0 »

ilaksh wrote: post #78
brindidrip wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example that I noticed: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74678832/change-text-col...

It looks like it will work, although haven't tested the exact code. Has anyone tested it and if so, this really shouldn't be downvoted. If the SO users start downvoting bot-generated answers that are correct and working, I think that's a sign that SO is much less relevant. They should definitely downvoted them if the code doesn't work though.

There are perfectly valid reasons to downvote AI answers, no matter the content:

- Whoever submitted the question very likely doesn't understand the question well enough to answer it themselves, so any feedback is not going to get a reasonable answer.

- The amount of time to check whether an answer is correct is non-zero. If you could somehow know that the answer was written by a human that ensures that the effort on the part of the answerer was non-trivial, and the "proof of work" infuses the answer with a minimum amount of trust which is absent in the case of a generated answer. Compare to a spam email: you wouldn't read all of the emails in your spam box thoroughly to determine if any of them contained a nugget of truth. You'd assume ill intent, and treat the contents accordingly.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#277

Post by nwienert »

wizeman wrote: post #240
tartoran wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't most humans just regurgitate the same arguments they've just read or learned elsewhere (or even here), like 99% of the time? Yes but at least they choose what they regurgitate unless you think of most people as automatons. Personally Im more interested in human regurgitations than AI immitations of these. So far AI doesn’t bring any reasoning and cannot discern what it regurgitates but sure as hell comes off…

> Yes but at least they choose what they regurgitate unless you think of most people as automatons. And what, are you saying ChatGPT doesn't choose what it regurgitates? It seems like these arguments are getting more and more flimsy. I do believe people (including me) are automatons because I think free will is logically impossible in the way most people intuitively think free will is. Edit: to clarify, I believe peo…

Humans only reply very occasionally (except smoldesu in Apple threads) and often have unique experiences, whereas AI will always answer any question you give it (even if it has absolutely no idea it’ll make up some bs) and it tends to “play along” with the prompt and agree, and always gives its best average response. You can make ChaGPT disagree with itself within two prompts trivially.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#278

Post by dorkwood »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #50
senko wrote: post #7

This is just a preview of things to come. Wait a few weeks until Google is completely swamped with ChatGPT SEO pages barely distinguishable from the real thing. If I worked at search quality at Google, I'd be very worried.

I expect Google to be irrelevant soon enough. ChatGPT already does a better job of finding answers to a lot of technical questions than Google.

It depends on the question. Try asking it how fast you would need to travel to get from Los Angeles to New York in 1 hour. It consistently tells me that this is impossible, even if I was traveling at the speed of light.

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#279

Post by 22c »

bambax wrote: post #84
josephcsible wrote: post #56

I wouldn't even mind so much if the answers were right. The problem is that a lot of them are totally wrong, but completely reasonable- and plausible-sounding, and in an authoritative tone, so unless you already know the right answer, the only way you'll realize its answer is wrong is the hard way.

That's the worst part. It's all fun and games when it tells a story of cheese sandwiches and VCRs in the style of the King James bible, but when it gives wrong answers in an authoritative tone and then insists it absolutely can't be wrong, it's terrifying. I don't understand what good could come of this. Or at least make it detect what is fiction and what isn't. People are treating it like it's Wikipedia, but it's no…

At least one upside of answering StackOverflow questions is that (at least for now) the presumably human who asked the question will attempt the solution provided and mark the answer as correct if it worked.

If the AI spits out some gobble-de-gook that doesn't even work, the answer will probably be downvoted.

However, that doesn't mean that the answer will be necessarily high quality or bug-free, the same can be said about answers given by a human. At the same time, if it's stupid but it works...

Re: Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

#280

Post by tartoran »

wizeman wrote: post #272
tartoran wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get ready to see a lot of human spaces invaded by somebody elses AI with goals that are not in your interest. It’s been happening already with chatbots pulled by strings by nefarious people but that operation will only amplify to a point that it will become cumbersome and hard to know whether you’re chatting or reading something that came from a human or language model. To me internet comments are almost on life supp…

Interestingly, the same thing has been happening with reviews of products, although usually they are written by humans that are paid to write those (extremely biased, mostly deceitful) reviews. I mean, just look at many Amazon review comments... or even of commercial establishments on Google Maps and many other such places that accept user-generated reviews of commercial products. > To me internet comments are almost…

>But why would anyone (who is not toxic already) use such a bot to post comments about technical topics, such as in discussions about programming languages, interesting bugs being discovered, open-source software being released, etc?

To sway, to amplify, to manipulate, to pollute with noise, etcetera. I think these type of actors have more tools at their fingertips now than ever.

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