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Note: Not an AI or ML Expert, forgive any mistakes in terminology
StackExchange continues to slide down the rabbit hole of useful tools being made much worse through wokeism.
A few days ago, they secretly published new guidelines informing moderators they were no longer permitted to use AI detection tools. Removing posts generated by AI is obviously useful, and could arguably be considered critical. StackExchange's data is probably a significant part of what feeds AI Models, and so minimizing hallucination effects alone would be a good enough reason.
Beyond that, while I've found ChatGPT more helpful than Google on a great many topics, its accuracy isn't great. You still have to be an expert in the field to parse its answers and tease out what's real from what's not.
Beyond that, StackExchange sites are already rife with gamesmanship around generating reputation, so automating the provisioning of shitty answers to people who genuinely need help was doubtless being utilized at a wide scale.
Policy TL;DR: Moderators are stupid racists, who have been flagging too many GPT-like posts from Africa and Pakistan. So stop.
As one commenter put it:
Even here, we have to escape an obvious conclusion: these aren't GPT enthusiasts; they're people that love the gamesmanship of reputation and want to achieve it with minimal effort.
SE jannies are an interesting bunch, it's hard to tell if they have more of a spine than other mod groups at sites like Reddit. At least this time, it led to open revolt.
I find it interesting that, even here, there's left-coded language throughout the response, and even framing it as a "strike" is kind of hilarious. Especially when you're talking about a group of folks whose main skillset is closing new, more accurate questions that attempt to keep up with the rapidly developing field of software.
Stack overflow is in major decline. After peaking in early 2020, votes and posts on the site have fallen by over 50%. Much of this pre-dated Chat-GPT.
Here's a related discussion on HackerNews.
And even though the toxic moderation and clout-seeking behavior is the cause of the initial decline, LLMs pose a lethal threat I think.
Personally, I go to GPT-4 first now, then Google/Stack Overflow only if I can't get an answer.
A couple points: People like to poop on Chat-GPT's accuracy. These people should try GPT-4 which is much better. And, yes, there are mistakes. Often, this is from failure of the user to adequately define the problem. Fortunately, you can ask follow up questions and refine the code.
Honestly it outgrew itself -- its whole benefit case was separating the wheat from the chaff, and while its way of doing that was kind of magical for many years, the weak point is that it relied on not just quality answers but quality questions, and quality judges of the quality of both of these things.
The absolute number of quality people on the site has probably remained about the same -- but now those people are drowned out by the vast mass of users who are extremely low quality for a myriad of reasons.
The turn towards inclusiveness and equity may have accellerated this process, but I don't actually see a good way around it -- it's just Eternal September on a large scale.
Considering the GPT-x is in large part based on Stack Overflow for anything programming related, I don't see how it can be much better? I think it will filter more on volume than quality -- which is fine for simple questions that are already answered 1000 times, but not useful for the first-hand solutions to obscure issues that made SE great until 2019-ish.
On stackoverflow you get your answer in days, if at all. With GPT you get it in seconds. It’s better in that sense.
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