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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3210 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 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.

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