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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. What exactly was going so wrong with the temporary AI ban that they felt a near-180-degree turn would be better? I did see the mention of "the rate of inaccuracy experienced by automated detectors aiming to identify AI- and specifically GPT-generated content", but that hardly seems so catastrophic as to suggest the opposite would be better.

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Because they were losing traffic to chatGPT. Stack Overflow has been all about numbers and revenue for some time now.

Oh shoot, thanks for explaining that! When you put it that way, it definitely looks like a threat to the business!

I see the chain of reasoning, but it also seems quite logical that quality answers written by real humans should be a pretty big competitive advantage. Throwing away your biggest sales point just because the competition has something new is a business suicide.

Indeed it is business suicide. I posted this before on another discussion, but this seems to be a common trend [1]:

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

You're almost definitely right, but I'm not sure how unbanning AI will stop that trend though?

But isn't that the advantage of having ChatGPT in the ecosystem? Who wants to moderate a 1000th variation of the same trivial question? Let ChatGPT handle the easy cases and leave the hard stuff for SO. Perhaps SO management does not know their place and they try to swallow the world?

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