Stack Overflow Moderators Stop Work in Protest of Lax AI-Generated Content Guide...

×

Moderators of Stack Overflow have announced a strike in protest of the company's ban on moderating AI-generated content, claiming that this policy allows incorrect information and plagiarism to proliferate on the platform. Gizmodo reports: Last week in a post -- which has been downvoted at least 283 times -- Stack Overflow announced its new moderation policy that will only remove AI-generated content in specific instances, claiming that over-moderation of posts made with artificial intelligence was turning away human contributors. The company also said in its post that a strict standard of evidence needed to be used moving forward in order to manage AI content, and that that standard of evidence hasn't applied to most suspensions issued by moderators thus far. This directive was also communicated to the platform's moderation team privately before being posted publicly. The moderators of the website are claiming that this directive will allow AI content, which can frequently be incorrect, to run rampant on the forum while expressing discontent with Stack Overflow for not communicating this new policy more effectively.

"Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content in the wake of a flood of such content being posted to and subsequently removed from the Stack Exchange network, tacitly allowing the proliferation of incorrect information ("hallucinations") and unfettered plagiarism on the Stack Exchange network. This poses a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content," the mods write in their letter to Stack Overflow. "Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content in the wake of a flood of such content being posted to and subsequently removed from the Stack Exchange network, tacitly allowing the proliferation of incorrect information ("hallucinations") and unfettered plagiarism on the Stack Exchange network. This poses a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content," the mods write in their letter to Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow moderators, like those at Wikipedia, are volunteers tasked with maintaining the integrity of the platform. The moderators say that they tried to express their concerns with the company's new policy through proper channels, but their anxieties fell on deaf ears. The mods plan to strike indefinitely, and will cease all actions including closing posts, deleting posts, flagging answers, and other tasks that help with website upkeep until AI policy has been retracted.