StackOverflow has banned the Generative AI and ChatGPT
Recently, StackOverflow introduced a temporary policy to ban AI generated content on the platform. It is said on the official question thread that this policy “intended to slow down the influx of answers and other content created with ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies”. What’s wrong with this community decision?
Thousands of answers and comments flooded the StackOverflow since the ChatGPT spread across all sorts of content makers. People were trying hard to exploit ranking system and produced enormous amount of answers, mostly incorrect, that overloaded moderators. As a reputable source of information about making software, and as a platform caring about the content quality, StackOverflow decided to introduce a temporary policy that prohibits content created using ChatGPT and other Generative AI.
What makes this story dramatic is the most popular answer on the policy thread by Samathingamajig, the regular member of StackOverflow having 11.8k points. He reported two contradictory answers from ChatGPT as an illustration of it’s imperfection in response generation. Reaction? “it’s perfect and proves how stupid this thing really is.”, said another commenter. And here the conversation turned crazy. People started to criticize university writings, proprietary software licenses and so on.
Such amount of negativity blurs the borders of real risk imposed by the policy and by the ChatGPT itself.
This policy looks like a dawn of new sort Medieval. From now, normal user content could be treated as AI generated by moderators. Anyone on the platform could be persecuted for using ChatGPT to improve their answers, even if he or she didn’t use fancy new way of writing highschool essays.
Furthermore, the reasoning of the StackOverflow crowd is highly focused around the improper usage of ChatGPT. People, you do it wrong!
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