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Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

news.ycombinator.com

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

#41

Post by theptip »

brindidrip wrote: post #26

It seems like there are a few potential negative consequences of using AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow. For one, the quality of the answers may be lower than if they were written by a human. Additionally, if these AI-generated answers become too common, it could potentially lead to a more impersonal and less supportive community on Stack Overflow. Finally, if the AI is able to search the internet and "inbreed"…

Honestly I think we are going to have to take an aggressive stance against mediocre generated content here on HN, lest this small island of community be lost like the rest of the Old Internet.

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

#42

Post by snek_case »

ubj wrote: post #37

And so it begins. Welcome to the new internet. I'm bracing myself for when this wave of AI content hits academic journals.

With a bit more refinement, if it had the ability to generate graphs, etc, it might be able to generate very believable papers. At least, believable enough that you can't tell without reading the paper attentively.

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

#43

Post by dejj »

arkitaip wrote: post #32
brindidrip wrote: post #26

It seems like there are a few potential negative consequences of using AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow. For one, the quality of the answers may be lower than if they were written by a human. Additionally, if these AI-generated answers become too common, it could potentially lead to a more impersonal and less supportive community on Stack Overflow. Finally, if the AI is able to search the internet and "inbreed"…

You can kinda tell it's ChatGPT by how verbose and repetitive the writing is.

Can’t we have ChatGPT identify output of ChatGPT, adversarily?

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

#45

Post by spaceman_2020 »

darkwater wrote: post #38
brindidrip wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, one way to identify responses that may have been generated by ChatGPT is to look for signs of repetitive or verbose language. Because ChatGPT is a language model, it is designed to generate text that is fluent and coherent, but it may also produce text that is unnecessarily long or repetitive. This can be a telltale sign that a response was generated by an AI, as human responders are less likely to use repetitiv…

This is fun but it's already starting to NOT be fun.

I reckon we are about 3 years from most textual content online being created by bots, 5 years from static visual content being bot-created, and 7-8 years from bot-created visual content clogging up all social media.

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

#46

Post by nsvd »

mojuba wrote: post #31
ggerganov wrote: post #21

I was thinking, what part of HN comments do you think are already AI-generated? As a human, I cannot give an accurate estimate. /joke

Who cares if the comments are good enough?

For example, if one entity generated a large portion of the content, they could easily introduce a bias in these comments, to sway the opinion of readers. Automated astroturfing.

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

#47

Post by theptip »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #16

I assume that this is by folks wanting to up their scores. That's a huge problem with "gamification." I'm not especially a fan of the concept, in a venue like SO. I think it has led to a rather nasty community, and I hardly ever go there, anymore. I assume that we'll be seeing a lot of robotic HN content (I would not be surprised if it is already here, but has been sidelined by the mods).

The gamification mechanic was the innovation that let SO become as successful as it has, IMO.

Without it there was no real way to figure out the “best” answer to problems.

It’s fair to note that big communities can have somewhat unfriendly dynamics, but I think that’s more about big communities than the gamification mechanic.

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

#49

Post by michaelteter »

It means we are coming full circle.

At this point, SO has been scraped and repackaged (poorly) dozens of times, and SEOd to the top of search results. Even some "tutorial" sites are just repackaged SO answers.

It is only fitting that the automated SEO websites get fed automated content.

In a way, this makes the real humans, particularly the ones who know actual things, more valuable. It may so much noise that only a skilled human could decipher a real question and a real answer or solution from something similar but wrong.

To be fair to GPT, many human answers are sub-par and should be filtered out as well. Perhaps that's the real test: what percentage of GPT answers are decent vs human answers? Here I might bet on GPT.

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

#50

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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.

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