Stack Overflow has temporarily banned users from sharing their responses with other users.
After consultation with its community, the site's mod said a final ruling would be made in the future. The mod explained that it's too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with answers that are often wrong.
There is a high rate of being incorrect when the answers are produced by the company.
The main problem is that the answers which are produced have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they are good and the answers are very easy to produce. The volume of these posts needs to be reduced. It is not allowed to create posts on Stack Overflow with this method. If a user is believed to have used the site after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed to prevent them from posting any more content.
The chatbot is based on the GPT- 3.5 text generator. A web demo for the bot was released last week and has since beenenthusiastically embraced by users. The bot's interface encourages people to ask questions and in return offers impressive and fluid results across a range of questions.
Many users have been impressed by the capabilities of chatGPT, but others have noted its tendency to generate false responses. If you want the bot to write a biography of a public figure, you should ask it to do so with complete confidence. It can produce believable but ultimately incorrect code if you ask it to explain how to program.
Statistical regularities in text are learned by artificial text models.
This is one of the many flaws of large language models. The systems are trained by analyzing huge amounts of text. They use statistical regularities to predict what words will be in a sentence. They don't have hard-coded rules for how certain systems in the world operate, which leads to their propensity to create bullshit.
It is not possible to say with certainty what percentage of the output is false. The company has decided that the risk of misleading users is too high.
Experts in the artificial intelligence community are debating the threat posed by large language models. While LLMs can generate bad output like misinformation, they don't make the actual sharing of this text any easier, which is what causes harm. The ability of these systems to generate text cheaply increases the risk of it being shared.
There has been no evidence of the harmful effects of LLMs. The scale of these systems creates new challenges. The site's mod said that the "volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often need a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that."
The fear is that this pattern could be repeated on other platforms, with a flood of artificial intelligence content drowns out the voices of real users. It would depend on the nature of the platform and its moderation capabilities. There is no guarantee that these problems can be mitigated in the future using better tools.
The scary part was the fact that it was not correct.
Stack Overflow's policy announcement on the site's own discussion boards and on related forums like Hacker News have been broadly supportive, with users adding the caveat that it may be difficult for Stack Overflow's mod to identify artificial intelligence answers in the first place.
One Hacker News user said that the bot's answers to queries about coding problems were more often wrong than right. The user said it was frightening. There were mistakes in the text.
Others asked the bot to make arguments for and against the ban of artificial intelligence. In one response the bot came to the exact same conclusion as Stack Overflow's own mod: "It is a complex decision that would need to be carefully considered by the community."
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