The Role of AI in Question and Answer Sites: Addressing Concerns of Plagiarism and Quality

Question

The Role of AI in Question and Answer Sites: Addressing Concerns of Plagiarism and Quality

Introduction

This document aims to shed light on the role of AI, specifically ChatGPT, in question and answer sites, while addressing concerns regarding plagiarism and the quality of AI-generated responses. It is essential to understand that ChatGPT is not synonymous with plagiarism or low-quality content, as it operates based on the information provided to it from various databases. This document will explore the need for open-mindedness when electing new moderators and propose a balanced approach that acknowledges the potential of AI while maintaining the responsibility of users to ensure quality in questions and answers.

The Nature of AI-generated Responses

AI, such as ChatGPT, reproduces responses based on the knowledge it has been trained on, utilizing a wide range of databases, both public and private. However, it is crucial to differentiate between requests for general examples and specific code created by individuals. AI should be regarded as a tool that aims to provide user-oriented responses, rather than being seen as a source of plagiarism.

Challenges in Adaptation and Moderation

The challenges faced by question and answer sites are not solely related to AI. The adaptability of these sites and individuals to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI integration plays a significant role. The pace at which questions are asked and answered, in relation to moderation response time, can impact the overall functionality of such platforms. It is important to acknowledge that blaming AI alone for low-quality or plagiarized responses is an oversimplification. Rather, it is a matter of adapting moderation practices and the community's mindset to accommodate this new paradigm.

The Influence of Toxicity and User Preference

The presence of toxic behavior within communities, as observed in sites like Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow en español, has led many users to seek assistance from AI platforms like ChatGPT. Users often find it easier to interact with a chatbot than to face potential dismissal or unhelpful comments from human users. Consequently, ChatGPT has gained popularity as a source of guidance and solutions for various queries.

The Journey Towards Improved Responses

As ChatGPT continues to enhance the quality of its responses, and users become adept at formulating precise and comprehensive questions, the distinction between AI-generated and user-generated responses will become less noticeable. It is essential to recognize the ongoing development of AI and its potential for improvement over time, contrasting with the stagnation often seen in moderation practices.

An Evolutionary Approach to Moderation: A Feature Request and Site Recommendation

A balanced approach to moderation involves determining the accuracy of responses, regardless of their source. Allowing users to mark AI-generated answers as such and avoiding reputation changes based on votes would ensure transparency. Similarly, implementing systematic review queues would facilitate quality assessment of questions originating from AI sources. The responsibility for maintaining the quality of questions and answers rests with the users, highlighting the importance of their active participation in the moderation process.

Proposal:

1. Modify the question and answer form by adding a checkbox that indicates when a question or answer is generated using AI.

2. Ensure that the reputation of users involved in AI-marked questions or answers remains unaffected.

3. Implement a system within the queues to easily identify questions and answers that have been marked as AI-generated.

4. Exclude AI-generated content that has been marked from the established moderation limits within the queues.

The Importance of Valuing Volunteer Contributors

While numerical metrics are important for businesses, it is crucial to also recognize the value of volunteer contributors within question and answer sites. The 600 votes typically gathered during the moderators' strike may not be sufficient evidence for immediate change or meeting the demands of moderators and a significant portion of the community. Personally, I disagree with the policies implemented thus far and believe that the importance of volunteers should not be overshadowed by mere numerical considerations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AI, including ChatGPT, cannot be simplistically labeled as a source of plagiarism or low-quality content. It is a tool that responds based on the knowledge it has been trained on, and its implementation requires a balanced approach. The evolution of question and answer sites should involve open-mindedness, adaptability, and recognition of the potential benefits AI can bring. By embracing AI while maintaining user responsibility for quality, question and answer platforms can thrive in the changing landscape of technological advancements, all while acknowledging and valuing the contributions of dedicated volunteers.

While the solutions proposed by moderators adhere to a zero-tolerance approach towards AI, the reality is that large corporations are increasingly embracing the idea of AI implementation.

Answer 1

However, it is crucial to differentiate between requests for general examples and specific code created by individuals.

Why? That's never made clear.

AI should be regarded as a tool that aims to provide user-oriented responses, rather than being seen as a source of plagiarism.

Again, you're making an assertion here. But you have not provided anything to back up your claim. If someone copies output from somewhere and pastes it here without attribution, that's plagiarism. Doesn't matter whether it originated from an AI or not.

It is important to acknowledge that blaming AI alone for low-quality or plagiarized responses is an oversimplification.

I don't think that's important to acknowledge, because that was the status quo for years. Low quality contributions to these sites have been a problem that we've been fighting against for years, well before these LLM AI's gained prominence. The problems is that AI makes it that much easier to be a one stop shop for semi-customized content, and it's hard to deal with the kind of volume it enables.

Rather, it is a matter of adapting moderation practices and the community's mindset to accommodate this new paradigm.

We don't have to accommodate this new paradigm. The moderator team was doing an admirable job of keeping up with it.

As ChatGPT continues to enhance the quality of its responses, and users become adept at formulating precise and comprehensive questions, the distinction between AI-generated and user-generated responses will become less noticeable.

If AI's are one day able to actually understand the questions as well as humans can, then at that point policies can change. They aren't there yet. They can quickly write a response that's well written and certainly related to the question being asked. But they're not yet at the point where they can consistently understand the actual problem being asked. At least on Stack Overflow - I haven't paid much attention to other sites.

A balanced approach to moderation entails determining the accuracy of responses, regardless of their origin.

That's great - but moderators often don't have the subject matter expertise to evaluate the accuracy of an answer, and that's never been something that's part of their "job description". They're there to handle exceptional cases - plagiarism, spam, abusiveness etc. Okay, if someone is repeatedly posting terrible answers that make no attempt to solve the problem and are full of grammatical errors they might intercede. But that's rare. It's always been on regular users to use their votes to judge quality of the content. And given enough time, any answer written with decent grammar and sounds related to the question will garner the user far more reputation points than it loses, regardless of whether the answer actually addresses the problem being asked. That's why stopping this massive flood right away was so important.

Allowing users to mark AI-generated answers as such and preventing reputation changes based on votes would ensure transparency.

The reason people post AI generated answers is to gain reputation points. So they're very unlikely to actually mark their answer as AI generated. If we wanted AI generated answers, it'd be very easy for the company to automatically interface with Chat GPT's AI, feed it the question and tag details and a list of Stack Overflow rules, and have the site automatically generate an answer. There's no need for any regular users to go off and do that.

While the solutions proposed by moderators adhere to a zero-tolerance approach towards AI

Their stance is zero tolerance right now, as the flood of AI generated answers would overwhelm the site otherwise. That doesn't mean they all don't think that it has some place here, though some of them may be of that opinion.

the reality is that large corporations are increasingly embracing the idea of AI implementation

Just because some large companies have found a use case or a potential use case for AI doesn't mean that it's appropriate here.

1. Modify the question and answer form by adding a checkbox that indicates when a question or answer is generated using AI.

Do you honestly believe that users seeking to inflate their reputation points will mark AI generated answers as being AI generated? The answer should be a clear no.

2. Ensure that the reputation of users involved in AI-marked questions or answers remains unaffected.

Voting is supposed to be a means for others to assess the quality of an answer. It's not perfect, but it's what we've got to work with. If you remove that, then it puts even less enticement for users to ensure their posts actually address the problem posed in the question. Again: if we want to bring in AI generated answers, the company can do that quite easily. It's something a junior developer could probably implement. There's no need for regular users to go fetch them themselves.

Implement a system within the queues to easily identify questions and answers that have been marked as AI-generated.

You're still relying on self-reporting. That's just not going to be feasible.

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Sorry, I just don't see any actual benefit from your proposal, as it fails to recognize the actual problems with the current generation of AI. It sounds like you are just a big fan of AI and think it belongs everywhere, without taking the time to think critically about whether it actually fits or not.

Answer 2

My position stems from usage of Stack Overflow, and might not withstand for other sites.

I have two major problems with this proposition:

A user qualified to verify AI-generated answer, doesn't need AI to create an answer

• If you are a subject-matter expert, you don't need ChatGPT to generate an answer: you are good on your own.
• If you aren't a subject-matter expert, you can't reliably verify an answer provided by ChatGPT, and shouldn't answer that question.

Plus, if a question is so trivial or well researched that ChatGPT can reliably answer it, then chances are pretty high that said question is a duplicate, and shouldn't be answered in the first place.

Uncontrolled posting of AI answers

For the Stack Exchange network to exist, it is essential that users are reasonably sure in the adequacy of answers.

Since we cannot in any reasonable way guarantee that a provider of a ChatGPT answer will in fact verify the answer, it is safe to assume that many such answers will not be verified by the author. So we need some additional safeguards in place.

To ease creation of said safeguards, your idea can be taken one step further: every question receives an automatic answer from ChatGPT (from a specific account without any reputation), and users are still prohibited from providing AI-generated answers.

But it places a significant burden of verification such answers onto the community (possibly through some additional queue), without any obvious profit (of community), in my opinion.

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Some more thoughts on long-run perspective: if/when "AI" will begin to produce reliable answers, Stack Exchange will immediately become obsolete, because there will not be any need to store answers somewhere, if you can always ask it again.

Answer 3

Allowing users to mark AI-generated answers as such and preventing reputation changes based on votes would ensure transparency. Similarly, evaluating the quality of questions originating from AI sources can be facilitated through systematic review queues. The responsibility for maintaining the quality of questions and answers rests with the users, emphasizing the importance of their active involvement in the moderation process.

I don't think this will be a worthwhile fit for the sites in general. As a personal stance, which I've seen voiced by others on the sites I participate/visit, a major issue is that AI generated answers can not only be wrong, but be extremely confidently wrong such as in this recent case involving lawyers. How do you verify that these answers are indeed correct? With the immense amount of answers (and questions) in review queues already, there would need to be a lot more support to sift through a lot more nonsense.

Even worse is when the answer looks correct, but breaks down upon closer review. Granted, human written answers can fall into this category too. However, AI generated answers in general consistently look good while having no indication of validity, and there is no possible way to have a convincing track record. It can already be a challenge to manage human written answers that are poorly written or contain bad information. Adding additional answers that have no track record (and no reasonable way to build a track record) is just adding a lot more work for not much gain. At the end of the day, with the availability of these AI chatbots, why would question askers need other people to dump their question into an AI for them? They could do it themselves.

Ignoring malicious actors, the problem goes further with AI answers with fabricated information. Let’s take the Travel Stack Exchange site as an example. If an asker wants to travel to country A, but their visa has a mismatch in their name, and the country recently had a policy change to require all details be a match, they would need to reapply for the visa. An average human answerer may start writing the wrong answer, go to link a relevant section in the country's immigration page, and see that the details have changed and thus change their answer. An AI may answer based on the old information it was trained on, or even worse fabricate an answer and citation, and not have any counter checks. If the answer requires research to answer correctly, are we expecting all reviewers to do the research before judging the AI answer? If so, why not just have them do the research and write an answer directly?

In its current state, AI-generated answers are not suitable for the site and likely won't be for awhile. There isn't anything stopping people from just using the AI to ask their questions directly, meaning they won't add significant value to the site in terms of quality. This would mean there would be a significant increase in the amount of curation and moderation to perform for not much gain in terms of quality answers.

Answer 4

Premise:

1. With the correct prompt, you can elicit a decent to good answer out of GPT.
2. GPT is not psychic. It cannot see what's not there.
3. Most questions lack context.

Let me repeat the latter claim: most questions are incomplete, non-repro, don't properly show what exactly the OP is trying to do and what their edge cases are, and so on.

Now one can take such question and plunk it, along with its title, into GPT and get a good answer out of it.

There starts the fractal of "yeah, but". "Here are seven ways in which you could solve that problem", it'll start, followed by six to eight potential solutions. And each of those will be somewhat viable, but nobody but the OP will be able to answer the question of whether they actually are. Answering a question properly requires some back-and-forth between the asker and the potential answerer.

ChatGPT doesn't ask these questions, it just plunks a fistful of possible solutions onto your screen. If you dig into one of those, sure, it might work. It might just as well be an outdated, insecure or incorrect approach. The asker won't know (or they wouldn't have to ask), nor does the answerer (or they wouldn't have to ask GPT nor post it as an potential fix).

So to address your

As ChatGPT continues to enhance the quality of its responses, and users become adept at formulating precise and comprehensive questions

If you don't know what to ask (because you don't know what the OP is looking for and you can't fill in the blanks because you lack experience), there is no question that will yield an acceptable response.

Answer 5

While the solutions proposed by moderators adhere to a zero-tolerance approach towards AI, the reality is that large corporations are increasingly embracing the idea of AI implementation.

Communities on the network have made this choice and have spoken. What large corporations do is irrelevant. In time, wanton disruption will be regulated.

Yes, if a model is trained to rehash content it was trained on, and does not attribute or provide its sources, it plagiarizes outright. Ethics do matter. Furthermore, if it does so with CC content, I think it violates the licence which requires attribution. Contributions to the network are made under the CC BY-SA licence. I find it offensive that human beings would be required to attribute when sharing and remixing CC content, while an AI would not.

In my opinion, these AIs produce lots of inaccurate content, and they will (sometimes) admit to it when pressed. They can't stop themselves from BSing their way around until told, not unlike trolls on social networks, an obvious source of some of their training, while deceptively using great prose to cover their tracks. But as history shows, it could be too late to undo their mistakes, as disinformation spreads fast and volume talks. These models have been poorly and carelessly trained, to justify the sale of better trained models, at the expense of accuracy, decency and ethics. At the expense of human beings and communities. In the meantime the damage is ongoing.

Answer 6

I'm glad to have had a chat with you yesterday in Spanish. As I mentioned, it looks to me that you have thought about this a lot and feared that this post would be "drowned in downvotes" due to this community culture, norms and workings despite your intentions and the post content.

IMO, the major issues of this post are:

1. As a feature-request, it's too broad.
2. It requires more work to explain the value of this contribution under this community's current circumstances.
3. "AI" and "ChatGPT" have been excessively overused.

I suggest you join the conversations on Tavern on the Meta, the Meta Stack Exchange main chatroom and/or Meta Discussions, a Discord server where SO/SE users gather together to have casual chats about ideas like you are sharing in this post. You might or might not support the current moderation strike; you might agree or not with the SO's December 2022 and other SE sites' generated-text ban; these spaces are open, in simple words, to anyone that respects other people and their content.

Related

• Is there an external space dedicated or strongly related to Stack Exchange Community?