I was going to post this as an answer (among many) under @Philippe's Statement from SO: June 5, 2023 Moderator Action, but that's currently locked, apparently due to concerns about the title, out of all things. Quoting from the linked post:
[Philippe] Both sides share a deep and unchanged commitment to quality on this platform.
Each day of muzzles on AI moderation (including, and culminating with, moderators' strike) adds to the backlog of GPT nonsense that gets posted as answers across the sites, and allows more of it to get upvoted and/or accepted, even though the answer may be worthless or plain wrong. This degrades the "quality on this platform" and goes against all the reassuring feel-good official SE posts of late.
For context, most of my firsthand experience comes from MSE (math) lately, where GPTs can write deceivingly fluent prose, but prose which either has little bearing on the question, or makes no math sense, or sometimes both. However, the "answer" may sound authoritative enough for the OP to upvote/accept it, and that creates a precedent for subsequent readers to trust it and perhaps upvote it more. This can and sometimes does snowball, which erodes users' trust in the long run. Somebody will eventually figure out if an answer is wrong, and then will trust SE less because it misrepresented it as a good answer. And such word goes around quickly, more so if it turns out to be due to misguided policies rather than just accident.
To the illusion apparently held by SE that 'forget the policy, f*** the moderators, regular users can take care of this via usual downvote/close mechanisms' -- that's simply not true. I am a regular user, and I had as few as 3 downvotes reversed for "serial downvoting", even though the respective answers were blatantly GPTs (and eventually recognized/closed as such). As I wrote here before: "Of course, humans can and do make silly mistakes, too. Difference, however, is that most of us refrain from posting every one of them out of a sense of propriety, and, anyway, we would not be able to generate them at the rate of hundreds per minute even if we wanted to for whatever trolling reason."
As a footnote, all this talk from the CEO about profitable growth seems to lose sight of the basic fact that whatever the metrics are—page views, click-throughs, engagement, sponsorships—those are ultimately driven by the user base of the SE sites, the perceived quality of and trust in the sites' contents, earned over many years, and the thankless work of all moderators towards those commitments. All of that is too easy to lose, though SE appears to be blissfully oblivious to that.
Knowing Philippe is in the position to speak for the company, how do you reconcile your "commitment to quality on this platform" statement with the reality of the latest AI guidelines which IMHO directly and immediately hurt the quality on this platform, per what I wrote above? Or, are there any ulterior motives that you could share with the rest of us, maybe?
