On Unanswerable Questions
It can answer questions so accurately that it's legitimately scary
If you're not asking solely about answerable questionsIt will be just as scary when it's wrong, but many won't realize until the consequences™ come.
Would a bot such as this one change the future of question and answer sites?
With the benefit of hindsight, to a degree, yes, of course, and instead asking generally about all /to some degree, they'll continue to do so.
For context, this post's original revisions took a much more defensive stance, viewing the question from an angle of "how useful would it be for AI-generated answers be posted averageon Stack Exchange question(s)?" My previous answer focused heavily on need for quality in questions,
Ever heard and my defense for the continuing value of the Stack Exchange network was based on "garbage in, garbage out"?
This is like the "oh no- computers are learning to code and now they're going to take our jobs- oh wait-both for the computer to solve a client's problem, the client will have to accurately describe what they want".
Maybe instead, people should try to build things toquestions and source/training data:
detect unanswerable questions and ask the askerIf someone doesn't know how to clarify on points that need clarifying.
I mean- what is ChatGPTask a good question, they're going to do forhave a "can you help me?" question on Stack Overflow?harder time getting a good answer from an LLM tool.
detect images of text and transcribe them, images of code and format them as code blocksFor any new field with the right language classifierless information about it included in LLM training data and less SEO juice to get good info found in web search results, imageslikelihood of tables and format them as tablesa LLM + search engine giving useful results is probably going to be low.
A year has passed, and the aspect of this question that I think (at least some)find interesting has changed. Concerning the future of Stack Exchange sites need those more than, my new interest is in the net possiblybenefits-accurate answers to answerable questions.
On Highly Localized / Unnecessarily-Non-Generic Questions
Maybe instead, people should try to build things to un-localize this technology has provided / genericis providing-inate highly localized questions. (Though personally not on the whole world, I'd still want such automation to bebut an assisance toolhere gated by human supervision instead of an unsupervised thing).
We have dedicated badges to incentivize editing posts (including questions) (editor, strunk and white, copy editor) and editing them along with answering them (explainer, refiner, illuminator) because many questions have room to be improved for the benefit of people other than the original asker. A chat AI sounds like it's designed to chat with and help one person. That's not what Stack Exchange is (although that's what many new users think it is, and that's what often happens).
I enteredcould this be a question from Stack Overflow relatingway to accurately answer questions that are on any of the numpy Python module and it gave a pretty convincing responseStack Exchange sites?
What was the questionSure? If it was one(to an extent.) Nowadays, there are hybrids of the many "please help me figure out whatsearch engines and LLMs, so all it needs to do is wrong with my code" questions..do a web search, and basically churn and regurgitate any existing answer content.
Maybe we should leave it at that. Maybe leaving it atI've heard tons of people online and my friends say that isthey find technologies like ChatGPT to be a good thinguseful tool for everyone. Even if an AI could provide correct, qualitygetting answers to any posted question (..questions. again, how do you answer an unanswerable question?), then the value it would provide to theMany of them who have newbie experience on Stack Exchange network (I think) would be to makecomment that they prefer it over Stack Exchange so questions that aren't on-topic orthey don't meet community guidelines could be easier asked and answered elsewherehave to deal with grumpy experts.
On Constructive, Subjective Questions
Would a bot such as this one change the future of question and answer sites?
Yes and no? If we get some magic-bullet™ that can answer any* question (thatThat's what ChatGPT is on-topic and meets community guidelines for topics that are a good fit for the Stack Exchange Q&A framework) on the spotat: service with a smile, many ofall the Stack Exchange sites mostly wouldn't be needed anymoretime.
We'rePeople like that. Traffic has certainly declined generally a(see repository of information in the form of fact-based, objective Q&AHas Stack Exchange's traffic decreased since ChatGPT?).
What such an AI by-definition could not replace, is answers to constructive subjective questions where answers are based on peoples' personal experiences. A human experience cannot be synthesized. They can be gatheredOkay, which is one ofso how the things weheck do here.
On Questions that Don't Meet Other Community Guidelines
Take a look at this MSO discussion: "Should I answer questions that include images of code (or violate other guidelines)?" (the answer is "No. Those questions should be closed.")I see benefit in that?
I mean- sure. Anyone who wants can write an answer if it's an honest attempt to answer theDealing with problematic question content is costly. But if the question does not meet community guidelinesIt costs time, and it should be closedcosts patience. It costs that to deal with questions that are missing key details, questions that are (unless it has enough historical value to justify keeping itfor lack of better description) just a mess, questions that are duplicates, questions where potential for long-term value is covered in which case it should be lockedthree feet of unnecessary context (and usually the hidden gem has already been asked before), etc.
On Misc Other Questions
What's And each of those categories abound endlessly. Deal with it going to do when you throw something completely new atenough and it? Ex. question about a new programming language?
My Closing Unsolicited Personal Thoughts: Do AI belong here on SE?
I think sucks the Stack Exchange network is a communityjoy out of Q&A for peoplebuilding a long-term knowledgebase.
When I read the Stack Exchange tour page, Here's how I read it (with my personal-thought inserted in parentheses,ChatGPT and emphases added)similar technologies do two things for that:
Stack Exchange is a network of 180 communities that are created and run by (human) experts and (human) enthusiasts like you who are passionate about a specific topic. We build libraries of high-quality questions and answers, focused on each community's area of expertise.
It "tricks" people into doing research and basic troubleshooting.
I say "trick", but really I mean that it masks research-related activities into a form that people find palatable. For some reason, many people either don't like to, or don't know how to google things (not that googling is a pre-requisite for asking a question on Stack Exchange (see How should we deal with Google questions? and Embrace the non-Googlers), but in my experience, it's usually (for question askers) a better search engine than the one built into Stack Exchange sites). But when the search engine is hidden behind a conversation with a machine, suddenly people find it very attractive (I guess the degree of synthesis and summarization (accurate/faithful or not) is also a factor).
This isn't always a productive thing. We all know that an LLM can spit out falsehood as well as it can spit out truth. It can mislead people, and that can result in those people posting weird questions on Stack Exchange (Ex. I'm trying to do X and ChatGPT told me to do Y (which makes no sense)).
But a lot of duplicates are very poor in quality, and less of those is a good thing. It means less curation workload, and less clutter mucking up searchability (bad signposts weigh out good ones). I've also started to see a (very small but hopefully increasing) trend in questions that show actually useful information prompted by conversation with an LLM. While this is slightly disappointing to me, since a lot of basic troubleshooting can be written statically and has no need for neural network involvement, it would seem that many of the people who love this technology are not the type to seek out the loving manual.
It (to some degree) deals with the boring, obscure, one-off requirement dumps / questions that just require a lot of synthesis of basic concepts / questions with a bunch of unnecessary context.
Or at least- that's what it seems to me like people who are trying to develop developer tooling around these technologies are trying to apply it to do.
People are often too lazy to do or just don't know how to do is generalize their questions (de-localize / create things like Minimal Reproducible Examples) while not blowing up the question scope (staying focused), or to break them down into separate questions that are appropriately scoped for Stack Exchange. I don't get an awful lot of those questions in the tags I answer in, so I don't know how much this situation has changed, but I hope that among the classes of questions that are no longer being posted, there are fewer of these.
Why do I read it that way? To meAnd in doing those boring things, a chat AI is not an "expert". I'm not sure how to explain it well. To me, an expert actually knows what they're talking about and what they're saying. Does a chat AI really know what it's talking about and what it's saying? And it's not an "enthusiast" either. It's mechanicaldoesn't get grumpy. It has no motivesocial battery (don't come after mewell, sci-fi peopleit consumes a heck ton of energy to run, but that's a different can of worms).
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky launched Stack Overflow, a site where (human) programmers could help solve each other's problems. Online. For free. Since then, millions of people have jumped at the chance to help a (human) stranger. And thanks to those people like you, the Stack Exchange network has grown to include 180 different communities visited by over 100 million monthly unique (human) visitors.
Also, the idea of people getting rep for an answer (evenI don't particularly care if the answer is correct) they got by blindly copy-pasting from ChatGPT feel... wrong to mewastes someone's time with a bunch of unhelpful info.
The help center page on reputation says: To the contrary, I welcome any side-effect that this technology has had on reduction in lower-quality question posts / increase in overall quality of question posts on Stack Exchange.
Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you; it is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you’re talking about. The more reputation you earn, the more privileges you gain and the more tools you'll have access to on the site.
If someone uses ChatGPT onlyThere are potential hidden costs- fewer people using the write an answer and doesn't personally verify its correctness, then that personsites directly means fewer votes didn't know what they were talking about(and voting matters), and the AI that generatedpotentially missing some gems of questions and losing out on them to the response didn'tmachine. But really know what it was talking about eithera lot of people can't vote anyway, and I think if a question is useful enough, as long as this platform itself can retain its reputation as a trusted resource, the gems will find their way here.