Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

Robot invasion, digital art

Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

A post on HN that drew over 300 comments.

My* response:

As a long-time user of Stack Overflow, I've noticed a significant increase in the number of answers from ChatGPT appearing on the site. While it's impressive that the AI is able to provide answers to some of the more complex technical questions on the site, it's concerning that these answers are often given without context or understanding of the underlying problem.

In some cases, the answers provided by ChatGPT are completely incorrect or even dangerous, and can lead inexperienced developers down a perilous path. This not only undermines the value of the site as a reliable source of information, but it can also put the users of the code provided by these answers at risk.

I think it's important for the moderators of Stack Overflow to take steps to address this issue, whether that means limiting the number of answers provided by AI or implementing measures to ensure that they are properly vetted before being posted. Otherwise, the integrity and usefulness of the site could be seriously compromised.

In case you didn't click on the asterisk, the response above is generated by ChatGTP. While verbose, the responses by GPT are becoming uncanny.

In the age of digital media, content has always been abundant but now that AI can generate it at will, it is now infinite. Consequently, this means that the role of curation is going to be even more important - knowledge management will be less about having access to information vs being able to filter high-quality information from everything else.

It's interesting to note that the internet started off with curation (eg. yahoo). Because this didn't scale with the number of websites that were brought online, google came to dominate with search. Now that the capability of generating human-like content is available with AI, I wonder if the pendulum will swing back to curation (at least until search algorithms can filter through AI-generated content)


Footnotes

  1. This was generated by ChatGPT with the following prompt Write a comment about "Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT. What are the repercussions of this?" in the style of Hacker News user kevinslinΛ„


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