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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3515 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I think it's as simple as: SE is positioned as a high-quality Q and A site above all else. In particular high-volume users and mods are particularly prideful about this and really, really hate low-effort stuff (plus, again, pride). SE rightfully banned chatGPT and AI content both in answering questions as well as (AFAIK) posing questions, both in generation as well as clarification. This lead to the site more or less continuing as before as well as a lot of bans and mod action to preserve this, coordinated with the site/network as a whole. They then did an about-face, threw the gates open to AI content, and have forbidden mods for banning people (or even doing more regular moderation) for AI content-related stuff. The manner in which this was done feels to some like shoving it down their throat.

So the mods and hyper-active users are unhappy. It should be mentioned that although SE feels like a Wikipedia-type site, and operates similarly in some ways, it's NOT. It's owned by a for-profit ed-tech company.

I think a blanket ban on AI content is stupid.

As long as it's clearly disclosed, all that matters is whether or not the answer is correct, which can be independently verified and better quality answers encouraged through voting.

I've found GPT-4 to be more than competent in medicine, and to the limited extent of my ability to judge, the same in coding and maths when I use it for autodidactic purposes.

The mods are choosing the wrong hill to die on.

As long as it's clearly disclosed, all that matters is whether or not the answer is correct, which can be independently verified and better quality answers encouraged through voting.

The problem with AI-generated text is that we can no longer use eloquence and details as a proxy for correctness. If I write a thousand words to answer a SE question, I probably know what I'm doing. If I write ten words, I can either be correct or not, but it's easier to verify. Now anyone can write a thousand-word reply to a question that will sound very authoritative, but might be as wrong as any of the short ones.

Fair enough, but at the end of the day I still think that GPT-4 is more competent than the median user, and that excluding it outright is a mistake. I think clear disclaimers more than suffice, and worst comes to worse we'll just be asking other AI assistants to spot-check them for us sooner rather than later.

The catch is that top stackoverflow posts probably aren’t the median user.

Wow, I wasn't aware of any of this. Despite being a developer, I don't really engage much with SE. If I find an answer to something there on a Google search, I'll usually prefer it over random blogs, but I don't have much interest in writing questions or answers there.

It seems to me that SE is designed to maximize karma given for fast answers to simple newbie questions, so that's where the great majority of the energy of it goes to. IME, it's very rare to get a real answer to an actual hard question. If I manage to find an unanswered hard question that I know the answer to, I'm willing to post mine, but I don't see much point in asking questions there.

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