AI-generated Answers experiment on Stack Exchange sites
8 comments
·February 6, 2025lovich
Mountain_Skies
Insular communities seem to be the fate of sites that put a strong emphasis on voting as a way of moderating content. SO gets scraped quite a bit. It's easy to do and even if the knockoff site only gets 0.1% of SO's traffic, it's worthwhile. Being text heavy means it's easy to host and gets good SEO.
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raincole
Quora has been doing it for a while.
But honestly everything about Quora is... ass (from interface to answer quality to moderation). The starting point is so low that I feel AI answer bot is a net positive for them.
I won't say the same for SE.
Jean-Papoulos
What's the point of having AI-generated answers on Stackoverflow when I can just ask the AI to begin with ? There is no added value here, especially given that the AI is trained on SO data to begin with.
forgotoldacc
It's a weird attempt to keep users on the site. Plus those AI generated pages will show up on google, when otherwise there might be nothing or the pages are being downranked due to being old.
Google promotes AI slop above everything else, so may as well get in on the grift before it's too late.
lutherqueen
Generally SO sites are my fallback after asking AI, and my way to know that the working solution I got is not using outdated or suboptimal features.
belter
At -256 ....
Am I alone in pretty much having completely stopped using stackoverflow in the past year?
Even before AI came out I was having problems with using it due to their community having turned into an insular group that was against the Outsider (e.x. having my questions closed as a duplicate of another question despite my question have quoted the original and pointing out the difference in my situation, not being able to get perms to do anything useful without having earned karma you cant get because the established players keep everyone else out, etc)
Now though I just end up reading docs on the tool in question or asking ChatGPT. In the times where ChatGPT was wrong or hallucinating, I never found the right answer on stackoverflow after.
Oh and thats beyond the seemingly endless amount of copycats who look like they are just scraping stackoverflow and then reposting with better SEO? Not entirely sure what it is but for a while I kept finding websites with duplicate down to the typo answers, as stackoverflow