Obviously, given the subject matter, I had to let ChatGPT generate a summary for this:
The Meta Stack Overflow post discusses a policy decision regarding the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, on the platform. The key points include:
- Ban on Generative AI: The community has decided to prohibit the use of generative AI for answering questions on Stack Overflow. This is due to concerns about the quality and reliability of AI-generated content.
- Quality Control: The decision aims to maintain high standards for answers, as AI-generated responses may lack accuracy and context, potentially leading to misinformation.
- Community Feedback: The policy was influenced by feedback from the community, emphasizing the importance of human expertise in providing reliable answers.
- Future Considerations: The post suggests that while the current stance is a ban, the situation may be revisited in the future as the technology evolves.
Overall, the policy reflects a commitment to ensuring that the content on Stack Overflow remains trustworthy and valuable to its users.
Is this post just highlighting the policy thats existed for 2 years, or has the policy changed?
It has now been finalized as of yesterday, from what I understand. Previously it was a work-in-progress policy change they were still unsure about, and now it’s decided that this is the way going forward.
I reckon sadly at least part of the reason will be that they are in a partnership with OpenAI, and feeding generated stuff into a GenAI breaks the model, so they need to keep SO as non-AI as possible.
Yeah this is just them trying to prevent model collapse (stemming from pollution of training data by ai garbage). The moral thing to do here is to not give a fuck and upload as much AI garbage as possible to poison their dataset. Fucking assholes.
“Avoid model collapse” aka “avoid giving garbage answers”. If they’re gonna use a lot of energy to train an AI, why not at least make the product good-ish?
Does the harm that does to the community not factor into your moral calculus?
It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.
And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.
But didn’t they say they were going to use all questions and answers to train ai?
Good. I had a couple of answers to one of my questions that just wasted my time before I realised they were AI. The authors didn’t get banned annoyingly.
Fuck Stack Overflow. They’ve created a culture more interested in finding reasons to close questions than anything else.
