Stack Overflow moderators go on strike after being instructed not to remove AI-generated content Options

[Christian J]

https://devclass.com/2023/06/05/stack-overf...erated-content/

A number of Stack Overflow moderators have declared a “general moderation strike” to protest about being instructed not to remove AI-generated content “outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances.”
...
“Moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content,” the striking mods said in an open letter.

...
The background is that StackOverflow appears to be struggling to make sense of the impact of AI tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT on its question and answer site. Traffic has fallen. The company’s initial reaction was to ban use of ChatGPT to post Stack Overflow answers via a “temporary policy”, to the approval of the community
...
“Stack Overflow ran an analysis and the ChatGPT detection tools that moderators were previously using have an alarmingly high rate of false positives. Usage of these tools correlated to a dramatic upswing in suspensions of users ...

Maybe a sign of what's to come once the AI bots are let loose on the web in earnest?

[pandy]

Not only bots. Faked content created by people, both text and images, will increase, I think. I've seen amazing images made with these tools. I've tried ChatGPT, tried to make it create an image but I didn't succeed. Everything seemed to work and I was given an URL for the resulting image, but nothing was there. I don't think I did anything wrong, put it's possible.

I was really scared by something. You know the text editor I prefer and that it's programmable with its own scripting language? The program hasn't been updated for a very long time and the author doesn't seem to have any plans for it either, the reason is he has more profitable programs, I think. The userbase probably consists of hardcore oldtimers like me, don't think they make many new sales. The documentation is in help files and aren't available anywhere on the web AFAIK. Someone asked ChatGPT to write a script for it. It made some mistakes, but it knew the syntax and made a fairly good try. How on earth did it know how to do that? Have they really sucked in information to that level, help files for obscure and almost forgotten programs?

It seems AI can be very helpful though. I guess the problem will be to control it, to separate good use from harmful use. Some of my image programs use AI. But in one case I don't think it is AI, they just use the word for its buzz. It's, supposedly, used for noise reduction, but I don't see it's learning and the company has a huge database from testing cameras and lenses, so I think the data rather comes from there. It's amazing anyway. Noise is just sucked out without smudging the image (not much anyway), as is the case with traditional NR.

[pandy]

Look at this. I was testing the limits of my old camera's sensor. ISO is way higher than that small and noisy sensor can handle.

Downsized crop.


After noise reduction (and some further editing)


Yes, it's smudgy, but it was from the start (the sensor's fault). But it turned something horrible into something useable, at least at smaller sizes. Especially note the white blobs against the dark sky in the denoised image. That's falling snow flakes. They aren't even visible in the first image because of all the noise. A traditional program would have smoothed everything out and the snow flakes wouldn't have survived.

Normal low light pictures look just splendid after denoising. So, if this is AI, it's very useful and it saves me a lot of money not having to upgrade to a full frame camera. There are programs that probably really use AI for NR (in case this doesn't) and they produce similarly good results. I think AI might be involved in this process too, but I don't think it "learns" from my images, it already has the data it needs, but it can be used to apply it, I guess.

At web size I think it's totally acceptable.



I've resized and saved as JPG for this. Had I started over from the raw it would look a little better, but I couldn't be arsed.