What did we do?
The site skipped the usual process of Area 51, and instead opted for an "experimental" launch method. In practice, this turned out to be a chat room and a Teams instance. When I signed up as a stakeholder, I was expecting to be using an Area 51 replacement prototype, as per:
...we will try a new process that is relatively reflective of what we think a new process for site building on the network should look like: public, discoverable, and out in the open.
We instead used Teams. I was later informed that the Teams was actually private. I found this disappointing; it's as if my hard work in carefully thinking through and refining posts on Teams has been effectively thrown away, unable to inform future users when making decisions. There are also issues with copyright for the /on-topic page (so now we have this). And since I'm not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Teams, I had some technical issues.
Stack Exchange, if you're going to do this again, may I suggest simply using an invite-only "alpha" site+meta once you get a quorum of stakeholders. Maybe give all the stakeholders diamonds and see if they can figure it out. (Or something in this ballpark—I have too many tabs open for this task.)
What went wrong?
Okay, the launch method was "experimental", so obviously it's not going to go completely smoothly...
The lack of example questions hindered making decisions about what's on/off-topic. You can see this problem reflected in my answer here on GenAI.SE meta, where I listed what I thought were "ethics questions", followed by wizzwizz4 commenting: Only the fourth question is about ethics. We're working with different mental example questions, so of course we're not going to come to a consensus. (I somewhat anticipated this problem, which is why I asked this.)
The accelerated launch process meant that hasty decisions were made in some cases (hopefully this is a once-off for GenAI.SE). Most importantly, the site's name was hastily changed to Generative AI. If someone was away for a few days, they may have missed the window of opportunity to have their opinion heard. This process also coincided with my travel around China, so I could have easily missed the window too. We now have the problem of a site called Generative AI, but a scope designed for prompt design. Topics like genAI inner workings were deemed off-topic at the time (AI.SE can have them), a decision which appears illogical at Generative AI. It's still not entirely clear how to proceed, but if we end up deciding that generative AI is on-topic at Generative AI, we would benefit from genAI developers helping us rewrite the scope as I get the feeling the stakeholders were predominately users of genAI (after all, the site was originally called Prompt Design).
The name change was motivated by wanting to avoid the buzzword "prompt design" (see e.g. this NSFW Reddit post), and the fact that interacting with genAI can be done in myriad ways, not just through "prompts" (e.g., a 20-minute conversation with ChatGPT, or an image-generation workflow which involves multiple genAIs and even manual steps). It was still meant to be about the applied use of GenAI tools, but after changing the name to Generative AI, we faced questions like How important are GPUs vs CPUs when training an LLM which, despite being an obvious thing to ask at a site called Generative AI, we had not considered previously.
We are now in a position where some users are downvoting and voting to close based what we declared on/off-topic for Prompt Design, and other users are coming to the realization that it's simply not feasible to declare generative AI half off-topic at Generative AI. This needs fixing.
Because the site was rushed, we're now dealing with the fact that only one user has sufficient rep (500) to vote to close (alleviating this problem seems to be the motivation behind proposing changing the rep levels, which has now been vetoed). Nevertheless, I think it's fine if we basically don't close questions for the time being; if a question unexpectedly gets good answers, maybe we should change the definition of "on-topic" rather than close it as off-topic.
Seeing the stakeholder updates get downvoted was discouraging: regular users and moderators (together with SpencerG, and some other Stack Exchange staff behind the scenes) were all putting in a fair amount of effort to try to make this work, despite the obstacles. Many of us have the same objections, but were just playing the cards we were dealt.
We have been getting some irregular voting at GenAI.SE recently. I personally am up to three separate "serial voting reversals" (which is crazy giving how few posts I've made). I would appreciate it if strike organizers would make a statement about not sabotaging GenAI.SE. In any case, it does not seem to be relevant to any of the strike demands (some stakeholders support the strike too!) [edit: actually it relates to "Stack Exchange, Inc. must communicate, gather feedback, and act on that feedback before making major policy or software changes to the public platform", although we have been in close communication with Stack Exchange for the last few weeks; see SpencerG's GenAI.SE meta profile or the chat], nor will it prevent people copy/pasting genAI as answers.
We anticipated many ethical concerns arising in questions, but nothing has come up thus far. Hopefully this is a sign that we won't get many ethically borderline questions in the future too.
Despite all these bumps in the road, the stakeholders worked together fairly harmoniously (working towards a common goal), and kind of "went with it" when surprises and confusion arose. We haven't worked everything out, so please be a bit patient with the new site. We're trying our best.
