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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

#311

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.

There are a great many problems with LLM's and AI in general. The underlying problem is, LLMs break the social contract in about as many ways as a human can dream up. There is no useful beneficial purpose that doesn't also open the door to intractable destructive forces manifold over that benefit; its a modern day pandora's box, and its hubris to think otherwise. This underlying societal problem has knock-on effects…

> There are types of people who will just take until no more can be given which is a type of evil, which is why you need to vet people beforehand but an LLM is simply a programmatic implementation of taking.

Your first argument largely rests on this, but isn't the fact that so many LLM-created answers get posted actually proof of the opposite? The LLM is, after all, "giving" here - and it's not like those answers are useless, just because they're made by an LLM. LLMs are perfectly capable of giving good answers to a large number of common tech support questions, and are therefore ("voluntarily") helping people.

> We are already seeing this disruption in jobs in the Tech sector that is 5 times the national unemployment during peak hiring (where offpeak has hiring freezes), in a single year. [...] Inevitably it also means someone will use that same thing to replace those expert jobs entry level portions with a machine that can't reason, and no new candidates can get the experience to become an expert. Its a slow descent into an age of ruin that ends in collapse.

This is your other argument, which is slightly more solid - I think that at least in the short term, we are going to see many of those effects. But overall, this dystopian "collapse" scenario is economically naive, for at least two reasons:

1. As it becomes harder to enter professions requiring high degrees of specializiation as the entry-level positions dry up, the demand for real specialists in these fields increases accordingly. At some point, it becomes viable for new talent to enter those sectors even in the face of a low number of "true" entry-level positions, as there is now an incentive to accept a much steeper upfront cost in terms of time invested on learning the specialization. If there are jobs that can at all be done and that pay 500,000$ per year, somebody is going to do them.

2. And I mean, besides, the entire "ECP in non-market socialist systems [...] guarantees a lot of death or slavery" argument is plain wrong. ("Pure ideology! *sniffs*"). We already live in a post-market capitalist society. Amazon controls enough market share in a large number of sectors that their operating model resembles Soviet-style demand planning when calculating how much produce to order (that is, order to manufacture). The Economic Calculation Problem, in the age of computers, is solved. We are not playing with abacuses anymore.

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

#312
post #260

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.

It may be an interesting side effect that people stop so gratuitously inventing random new software languages and frameowrks because the LLMs don't know about it. I know I'm already leaning towards tech that the LLM can work well with, simply because being able to ask the LLM to solve 90% of the problem outweighs any marginal advantage using a slightly better language or framework offers. Fro example, I dislike Pytho…

I created a new framework and fed my documentation + certain important code snippets into it. It worked out fantastic. Now adays though, the LLM never follows links and will hallucinate the whole thing, in a completely wrong language.

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

#313

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.

- AI answers are much easier and faster to produce thus it's going to produce a lot more wrong answers by sheer volume.

- AI answers are grammatically correct and verbose so it looks like the poster put effort into it which deceives people into thinking the answers is more trustworthy than it is.

Barring trolls, humans (for the most part) only answer if they think they're right, and the more effort put into the answer the more likely they don't get it wrong.

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

#314
I subscribe to a bunch of technical subreddits and over the last 2 years I've seen so many questions spammed to multiple subreddits. The account is new or every reply seems to be generic 1 line responses that could be autogenerated. I assume they are bot accounts to train an AI. Now before I write a longer technical explanation I look to determine if this is a real human asking and only then will I bother to reply.

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

#315
post #260

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.

It may be an interesting side effect that people stop so gratuitously inventing random new software languages and frameowrks because the LLMs don't know about it. I know I'm already leaning towards tech that the LLM can work well with, simply because being able to ask the LLM to solve 90% of the problem outweighs any marginal advantage using a slightly better language or framework offers. Fro example, I dislike Pytho…

I mean, this calculus was already there before LLMs when choosing a stack.

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

#316
post #249

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.

Fwiw, GPT o1 helped me figure out how a fairly complex use case of epub.js, an open-source library with pretty opaque documentation and relatively few public samples. It took a few back-and-forths to get to a working solution, but it did get there. It makes me wonder if the AI successfully found and digested obscure sources on the internet or was just better at making sense of the esoteric documentation than me. If t…

To be honest, many times GPT 4o helps me understand poorly written emails by colleagues. I often find myself asking it "Did he means this when he wrote this?"... I'm a bit on the spectrum so if someone asks me vague questions or hallucinates words for things that don't exist, I have to verify with chatGPT to reaffirm that they are in fact just stupid.

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

#317
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was instead a social shaming that cut so deep that the message you wrote is still burned verbatim into their memory after all these years? Maybe that was the point?

To be fair, after the ban expired, I started submitting the test cases as instructed and the community was very helpful under these constraints.

Are you saying it worked?

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a great many problems with LLM's and AI in general. The underlying problem is, LLMs break the social contract in about as many ways as a human can dream up. There is no useful beneficial purpose that doesn't also open the door to intractable destructive forces manifold over that benefit; its a modern day pandora's box, and its hubris to think otherwise. This underlying societal problem has knock-on effects…

> There are types of people who will just take until no more can be given which is a type of evil, which is why you need to vet people beforehand but an LLM is simply a programmatic implementation of taking. Your first argument largely rests on this, but isn't the fact that so many LLM-created answers get posted actually proof of the opposite? The LLM is, after all, "giving" here - and it's not like those answers are…

Why would you trust Amazon ?

At least the USSR's ideology claimed to represent the worker's interest, and so once that stopped happening in practice, the system collapsed. (And they were already in the age of computers, trying to do some of the first cybernetics.)

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

#319

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.

AI companies are already paying humans to produce new data to train on and will continue to do that. There's also additional modalities -- they've already added text, video, and audio, and there's probably more possible. Right now almost all the content being fed into these AIs is stuff that humans can sense and understand, but why does it have to limit itself to that? There's probably all kinds of data types it coul…

Hmm, has there even been much success in training neural networks on taste, touch or smell ? I kind of doubt we have good enough sensors for that ?

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

#320
post #93

The authors claim that LLM are reducing public knowledge sharing and that the effect is not merely displacing duplicate, low-quality, or beginner-level content. However their claim is weak and the effect is not quite as sensational as they make it sound. First, they only present Figure 3 and not regression results for their suggested tests of LLMs being substitutes of bad quality posts. In contrast, they report tests…

While this article doesn’t really seem to be hitting what I am about to say, I think someone on HN a while back described a related phenomenon (which leads to the same issue) really well. The Internet is Balkanizing. This is hardly a new concept but they were drilling down specifically into online communities. People are electing to not freely share information on public forums like they used to. They are retreating…

You mentioned forums twice, but what (non-platform) forums do you know that "engag[ed] in increasingly hostile design and monetization processes" ?
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