Stack Overflow has seen its moderators announce a strike due to the company's ban on moderating AI-generated content. The platform's new policy allows removal of AI-generated posts only under specific circumstances. This has led to concerns among moderators that the policy could result in an increase of inaccurate content, negatively affecting the platform's trustworthiness.
Here's a recap:
Moderator Strike Announcement: Moderators of Stack Overflow, a popular Q&A platform for programmers, have declared a strike in response to the company's decision to limit moderation of AI-generated content.
- The announcement was made on the company's Meta board, along with an open letter directed to Stack Overflow.
- At the heart of the dispute is a new policy, declared by Stack Overflow last week, stating that AI-generated content will only be removed under specific circumstances.
- Stack Overflow believes over-moderation of AI-generated posts is discouraging human contributors from the platform.
Concerns over AI Content: The moderators claim this new policy will permit potentially incorrect AI content to proliferate on the forum.
- The moderators have expressed dissatisfaction with Stack Overflow for what they see as a lack of clear communication about this new policy.
- They assert that the policy allows for the spread of misinformation and unchecked plagiarism, compromising the platform's integrity and reliability.
Company Response: Philippe Beaudette, VP of Community at Stack Overflow, responded to the moderator strike by reiterating the company's position and explaining that they are looking for alternative solutions.
- He stated that the company supports the decision to require moderators to stop using the previous detection tools for AI-generated content.
- He further added that the company is actively seeking alternatives and committed to promptly testing these tools.
Impact of AI on Stack Overflow: AI has been significantly influencing Stack Overflow, leading to both positive and negative outcomes.
- Stack Overflow confirmed to Gizmodo that website traffic has been declining as more programmers turn to OpenAI's ChatGPT to debug their code instead of waiting for human responses on the platform.
- Web analytics firm SimilarWeb reported a consistent monthly drop in traffic since the start of 2022, with an average monthly decrease of 6%. In March, the site experienced a 13.9% traffic drop from February, and in April, traffic fell by 17.7% from March.
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