How do you know if content is AI generated?
If mods could decree a piece of content as AI generated (and delete it) willy nilly, then that would be far worse IMO.
If mods could decree a piece of content as AI generated (and delete it) willy nilly, then that would be far worse IMO.
“helo plz can help w cod, is broke has error”
And then the next day posts four answers in perfect English to four different topics, with that GPT “vibe”.
You can’t reliably detect generated content in a vacuum, but Stack Overflow is a very metadata-rich environment for moderators.
Why censor good answers?
It is _effort_ to moderate content, to read answers and see if they are legitimate. It is almost zero effort to chatgpt out "answers".
The people providing the ChatGPT answers _do not care_ about them, they are only looking to pad their Rep.
It is an attack against the very core of the StackExchange system.
Also, theoretically (never happened), if someone mentioned their exceptional SE profile on their resume or their cover letter, I'd for sure ask them some details from the topics they suggest to be experts on.
Will they also bring ChatGPT to the interview? That'd be fun to watch.
If you are an applicant to a position where there are 5000 resumes submitted and the people doing the filter want a quick and easy numerical ranking of them - provide your Stack Overflow account.
At that point, they can look up your rep and pick the best ones based on that.
This doesn't happen as much in US based companies as there are other metrics that they can use to filter candidates rather than SO rep.
However, if you are in India and applying to a consultancy and every resume and transcript are very similar to the point of not being able to distinguish between them - SO rep provides a very easy way to rank and filter applicants.
Unfortunately, I can't verify this. I've only heard it second hand but it does make sense and helps explain why I occasionally get SO account and stats on resumes from contractors.
It is already done, as I've heard. The previous iteration was to pay your lookalike to pass the interview for you. Or just pay anyone and blame lack of camera on "technical difficulties".
Because a bunch of dumbass software companies (especially the sweatshop ones) decided that your annual review now needs to include a bunch of dumbass "open source software social work" or you get dinged on your review.
So, Github contributions, Stack Overflow moderation, etc. all became subject to Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
ChatGPT is just accelerating this contamination of the well to all-out flooding of it with industrial sewage.
Stack Exchange could just call an LLM API when a question is asked and show the response. That wouldn’t be near as valuable as their verified index of answers.
So if e.g. a user posts a dozen long answers within 10 minutes, and they all have characteristics of ChatGPT, that would be a pretty good signal.
Ah yeah, the frequency of posts definitely makes sense.
> output of specific AI tools like ChatGPT produces certain patterns that are quite noticeable
I would agree with you for gpt 3.5, but I don't think this is the case for GPT-4 (I've spent several hundred hours using GPT-4 for various tasks - mainly related to coding & learning random subjects).
Say, a person has an answer but English is not their native language and they manage to stir ChatGPT into writing a good answer. Would we prefer to have that posted instead of keeping a question hanging without an answer at all?
The only issue I can see with AI use is the rate of new content generation. Recent models are quite OK at giving a decent answer. SO is not a pinnacle of exceptionally well thought out answers from people either. There are great detailed and well sourced answers but more often then not you get an incomplete, outdated or even just plain wrong answers. Bespoke artisanal hand-crafted ethically sourced answers from fully organic free range humans that still lead to stack overflows and misalignments elements on webpages.
In practice, as reported in comments at https://meta.superuser.com/q/15021/38062 and in many other Meta Q&As, the answers that people are lazily machine-generating at high volume are far from correct; and the consequent upvotes that they garner reveal the unsurprising fact that there are a lot of people who vote in favour of things based upon writing style alone.
Why? It becomes irrelevant if an account is spamming, sure delete everything regardless, but if I have a generated and correct answer in my otherwise pristine account?
What I'm trying to say is, the fact that some people use it to spam shouldn't make it a simple ban condition. Otherwise that'd be banning emails to fight spam.
You haven't. People aren't. This is a hypothetical that isn't the reality, and an irrelevant distraction.
Go and read the comments where I just hyperlinked, then read the months of back-discussion on this in the other Meta Q&As that I mentioned, starting with the likes of https://meta.superuser.com/q/14847/38062 right there on the same Meta site, and a lot more besides on many of the 180 other Stack Exchange sites, continuing with the likes of https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/q/35651/13638.
How can you be so sure? If one day comes a 100% reliable way to detect all AI-generated responses, how can you be sure that also the good ones won't get deleted in one major sweep?
Yes, I see there are many people who despise the AI generated spam on many sites. But nothing you posted proves that all (I'd even say, "significant portion of") AI generated content is spam.
I don't see anything wrong letting the AI generate an answer and edit the rough/wrong parts if necessary.
And this is not what the previous moderation policy was trying to prevent. What it was trying to prevent is answers from people skip that second step.
> "But what if they were correct answers?" is largely an irrelevant hypothetical side-issue.
A separate question is why there's still a lot of crap questions/answers on SO if quality is the goal? There's a plenty of low-effort and incorrect answers made by real people that are not penalised in any way.
Only if you don't prompt it to do otherwise.