There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence that will replace programmers. However, the moderators of the popular forum for software developers – Stack Overflow, have a different opinion, seeing nothing in artificial intelligence but a parrot that will ruin the platform.

Stack Overflow is a forum for Q&A software developers where each participant can ask their own questions while answering user questions. The forum is focused on broadly understood programming, where you can ask both theoretical questions and direct requests for help. Interestingly, in 2009, Google officially announced the Stack Overflow forum for Android app developers. Forum moderators are volunteers, including developers, who are not paid for their time and contributions to the community.

Moderators protest. “AI will bring the value of sites to zero over time.”

A week after the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot, which ushered in a real boom in generative AI, moderators established an internal policy saying that any AI-generated content is prohibited on the Stack Overflow forum. The decision was dictated by both AI hallucinating tendencies and generating erroneous answers, and according to moderation, it contradicts the platform’s policy on appeals in responses.

Last week, the administration of the Stack Exchange platform, which also includes Stack Overflow, announced new, this time public, content guidelines. The new rules contradict previous guidelines for moderators, as they allow AI-generated content to be published on an equal footing with human-written content.

AI chatbots are like parrots. ChatGPT, for example, does not understand the answers given; He simply associates the prompt with the information he has access to and blurts out plausible-sounding sentences. There is no way to verify that the responses generated are accurate. ChatGPT is not a writer, programmer, scientist, physicist, or any other expert on whom our network of sites depends for valuable content. After typing the prompt, it simply combines words based on the information on which it was trained. He doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

– Wrote Mithical, one of the moderators of Stack Overflow

According to volunteers, allowing the use of generative artificial intelligence will lead to the degradation of the platform – not only Stack Overflow but the entire Stack Exchange and the loss of any substantive value.

Due to Stack Exchange’s decision on June 5, all Stack Overflow moderators have stopped moderating the forum, and the protest will only stop when the previous guidelines are made public and are in force for both users and moderation. In addition, moderators expect Stack Exchange to have an open discourse on the matter.