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Comment by insanitybit | Hacker News Reader

I'm asking what makes it worse.

From the post: “The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.”

Christ, I'm asking for more information. As I said, SO has tons of terrible and incorrect answers, so I want to know more about the impact of ChatGPT answers. Information like the rate at which they're correct vs incorrect, the rate at which they are submitted, and how that compares to normal answers.

The way I read it, ChatGPT acts as a force multiplier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication

Yes, there are terrible and incorrect answers, but adding ChatGPT allows this to happen at a much higher rate than previously. And it allows folks to put together coherent or correct sounding answers without knowing anything about the subject.

Volume. Volume is the difference. It's so easy to generate an incorrect, but confident answer with ChatGPT that it makes it so much harder for SO provide a valuable service.

This. Also I imagine, less tangibly, goodwill. Why should I bother to volunteer my time to provide a good answer that might be drowned under bot output? Doesn't even matter if that will actually happen; if people think it will then they won't write that answer.

You asked "Is ChatGPT much worse?"

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