The fact something is or isn't AI doesn't require independent moderation procedures. Either the content has an answer to the question or it doesn't.
The offence here is spamming, AI is orthogonal. Users spamming should be given a timeout.
You can make broad classifications for an act (it wasn't murder, it was negligent discharge of a firearm), but that doesn't preclude the fact that it is also something else (shooting in the direction of a person without regard to their life and killing them is murder).
In this scenario, spamming with or without AI would carry the same penalty. The benefit is that you don't need to determine if AI was involved, since it doesn't matter.
Similarly, use of LLMs to generate and post large quantities of text from a short prompt is inherently spamming. The user could provide exactly the same value by posting their prompt. If the prompt isn't valuable, the output won't be either, as anyone with a copy of the prompt could generate equivalent output for themselves if they wished to.
How is this different than people posting things that they didn't test themselves?
try
{code block}
Hope this helps
The problem isn't an LLM (though that just provides more scale) - its that incorrect information isn't removable / actionable on SO. If the person tried to answer a question it remains up.
There are definitely alternatives to the unilateral ban (Thinking about how, like, chess.com does bans based on people cheating), but saying "AI content is qualitatively no different" ignores the bigger ecosystem problem from having the average answer quality simply go down
LLMs are great at producing bullshit that looks convincing.
Essentially, one has to trust responders to provide answers to some extent. Untrustworthy responders can use generators to bullshit their way into acquiring trust.
I certainly don't have the answers (and let's face it it's likely going to be a problem here too).
So, like the current organisation of things, that works quite well? You put entirely too much value on moderators being perfect. Moderators have been biased forever, have banned for no reason forever. It's a website, you can live with that (or without it). If they're unreasonable, move away, find another place or create another place. If you can't move away, deal with it, create an alt, don't get caught doing the same thing that got you banned, and that'll be it.
This is true, and it's why the policy promulgated by the moderators was explicitly temporary. It was a response to an acute problem to give everyone time to figure out how to handle it as a chronic condition: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...
What is the point of a software Q&A site anyway, why not just read the docs?
In my experience, Q&A is useful because it summarises and consolidates disparate information into a concise response to a prompt (sorry, I mean to a Question!) which is... exactly what a chat AI does.
Isn’t chat AI an existential threat to SO, even if AI is banned there?
Certainly I find chat AI better in many cases, and if I don’t like the answers, just going to the docs is the next step, not a generic Google search with SO in the SERP.
There is knowledge you will never find in documentation. 50% of places where SO has been helpful to me are not "consolidating documentation". They are solutions to obscure bugs, Useful APIs which are not documented with any example, and low-level logic / high-level design solutions.
> hoping
Hmmmm