Labor action notice

Question

Today, 5th June, is the beginning of a strike by many StackExchange moderators over the recent policy announcement by StackExchange staff around handling AI and Large Language Model (LLM) generated content. You can read the strike announcement yourself at: https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ plus another detailed take at https://jlericson.com/2023/06/04/signing_on.html

For those who have not heard of this policy change—or don't want to click the link—the StackExchange staff announced that the use of AI-detection tooling to identify AI/LLM generated content for the purposes of deletion/bannning is now banned. Their justification for this move is two-fold:

• After testing, they've found these tools have a quite high false positive rate. Possibly up to 30%.
• These tools disproportionately affect people for whom English is a second language. AI/LLMs let them turn broken English into grammatical English, at the cost of now failing an AI/LLM detector.

The strikers argue that this cost is justified given the unique threat that AI/LLM represents to question and answer sites like ours.

• We've already seen spammers use these tools to provide an actual-answer seeming post with a spam link in it.
• The setup of the StackExchange sites is well suited to provide human qualilty-assurance for AI/LLM generated content, and that's not why we're here.
• AI/LLM content can be created far faster than humans can audit them, even if that was a role we were interested in.
• For sites with far more community than we've had in the last few years, a deluge of AI/LLM content will break that community.

The strikers will be ceasing moderation activities until this policy is reversed. Also of note, this includes halting the SmokeDetector anti-spam bot. Since late February, ServerFault has been under heavy attack by a group of pirate stream spammers. Most people haven't seen them because SmokeDetector spam-flags them out of existence within 5 minutes in most cases. With the SmokeDetector turned off, you will begin to see this traffic.

I will be respecting this picket line.

Answer 1

To expand on this:

announced that the use of AI-detection tooling to identify AI/LLM generated content for the purposes of deletion/bannning is now banned

I'll add two points:

• At least on Stack Overflow, we've not been using any automated detector as a primary (or for most/all of us, any) factor in removing generated content. It's been plainly obvious they were unreliable since about week 2 of this crisis.
• The edicts from staff in private go further than most publicly available statements. To follow the private rules, we are unable to remove AI content outside of the narrowest of circumstances. Effectively, we are not allowed to remove content on the basis of it being AI-generated regardless of detection method.

Answer 2

I think it's important to remember that not only those with diamonds moderate. We all do - through up and down-voting, through closing, flagging and so forth.

It's whats left of the community at stake.

I will not do any moderation actions, and have signed the letter.

Answer 3

I have not played the Serverfault game with any gusto for some time but my day job does land me here occasionally. When that happens I will often do some moderation.

I have signed the letter and will undertake no further moderation or curation of Serverfault.

Answer 4

Since this has gone live, StackExchange staff has provided rather more data to the Moderator community backing up their claims of AI/LLM-detection tools likely causing more harm. The details are not publicly released, so I'm not going to release it, but there is compelling evidence in there.

Most interesting to me, they used metrics only they have access to in order to heuristically determine who is likely using these tools to post content. Many of you know that the platform keeps 'hidden' versions in the background as you type. This dataset can be used to identify people who are pasting large blocks of text from other sources versus people like me who are typing a lot over the course of several minutes. This isn't an explicit ChatGPT-detector, but they shared a chart of answerers showing pasting behaviors over time.

That chart showed a large spike in the wake of ChatGPTs release, and a falling curve since. We hit parity with the pre-ChatGPT period around the first of May. This data is noisy, but when looking at periods of weeks is compelling that they've found a way to identify use of these tools. The key finding here is that AI/LLM usage isn't significant anymore.

They did another round of analysis, focusing on "people who post answers three or more times a week," which sounds like an internal "active users" metric they've been using for a while. Active users have been falling more than the long term trend as of about the first of December, and they're not sure why. Analysis hasn't given a clear answer, but one area that does seem to be affecting these numbers is the ban-rate of active users; a rate which has rocketed up in the wake of AI/LLM usage being deemed acceptable for sites to set policy about.

The ban-rate has not slacked at the same pace as detected AI/LLM usage, suggesting there is a high false positive rate. Supporting this, they revealed that they have an unprecedented rate of "unable to substantiate" results to appeals to moderator ban decisions. As in: they couldn't verify the reason for the ban.

This is data they should have posted with the earlier announcement. To their credit, this data was directly asked for and they've given it.

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The data I was working from is now public: GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes

The community response to this is happening in real time.