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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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The smart approach is to ban low quality and low effort content, whether AI or human generated.

Speaking for StackOverflow specifically: when it comes to technical questions, there's no easy heuristic that a non-expert can use to distinguish between a low effort post and a good post.

Posts that look good on the surface can still be bad. You can supply a 50 line block of code that compiles and seems to work, but it can have subtle problems that won't present themselves until later on. Or you can write a post that would be perfectly good in another context, but it's the wrong approach to this particular problem because of X Y Z non-obvious reasons. And of course LLM-generated answers can have these sorts of problems.

The site is based on a relationship of trust: if the post looks good, and it's upvoted, and the user has a high amount of karma, then the post was probably written by a human expert who is aware of the sorts of pitfalls I mentioned and knows how to avoid them. If you just have a blanket policy of "yep, AI is 100% allowed, go nuts", then it starts to erode that relationship of trust. More non-experts come to the site who start posting AI-generated answers without understanding them, they accrue karma, it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise.

In the limit case, human experts get disincentivized from posting because, well why go through the effort of spending 30 minutes writing a detailed answer when the AI posters will post 5 different (equally long and detailed, but perhaps subtly incorrect) answers in that time and the OP will probably just accept one of those answers anyway. That's the fear.

Whether a total AI ban is actually enforceable is another question. But this is the reason why people would want a full AI ban, instead of just a "low effort post" ban.

More non-experts come to the site who start posting AI-generated answers without understanding them, they accrue karma, it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise.

How is this different than the classic StackExchange / Quora regular who knows nothing about the topic but spends 20 minutes on Wikipedia and then writes out an answer as an expert?

If it takes 1 minute with AI instead of 20 minutes manually, that seems significant enough to affect volume.

Obviously we don’t want people to do that either.

Exactly, they're both bad and both deserve to get the banhammer, the only difference is in volume/prolificacy.

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