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imcritic 4 days ago

Why disallow AI input? Is it that poor? Surely it isn't.

noduerme 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The entire purpose of answering questions as an "expert" on S.O. is/was to help educate people who were trying to learn how to solve problems mostly on their own. The goal isn't to solve the immediate problem, it's to teach people how to think about the problem so that they can solve it themselves the next time. The use of AI to solve problems for you completely undermines that ethos of doing it yourself with the minimum amount of targeted, careful questions possible.

wtetzner 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What's the point of AI on a site like that? Wouldn't you just ask an LLM directly if you were fine with AI answers?

noduerme 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You're absolutely correct, but the scary thing is this: What happens when a whole generation grows up not knowing how to answer another person's question without consulting AI?

[edit] It seems to me that this is a lot like the problem which bar trivia nights faced around the inception of the smartphone. Bar trivia nights did, sporadically and unevenly, learn how to evolve questions themselves which couldn't be quickly searched online. But it's still not a well-solved problem.

When people ask "why do I need to remember history lessons - there is an encyclopedia", or "why do I need to learn long division - I have a calculator", I guess my response is: Why do we need you to suck oxygen? Why should I pay for your ignorance? I'm perfectly happy to be lazy in my own right, but at least I serve a purpose. My cat serves a purpose. If you vibe code and you talk to LLMs to answer your questions...I'm sorry, what purpose do you serve?

scirob 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I and many others already go the extra mile to ask multiple LLM's for hard questions or for getting a diversity of AI opinions to then internalize and cross check myself.

There are apps that build up a nice sized user base on this small convenience aded of getting 2 answers at once REF https://lmarena.ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/lm-arena-the-organization-...

All the major AI companies of course do not want to give you the answers from other AI's so this service needs to be a third party.

But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.

I encountered this recently in a niche non-US insurance project and I basically coded together the above as an internal tool. AI suggestions + human collaboration to find the best answer. Of course in this case everyone is getting paid to spend time with this thing so more like AI first Stack Overflow Internal. I have no evidence that an public version would do well when ppl don't get paid to commend and rate.

noduerme 4 days ago | parent [-]

I was making a point elsewhere in this thread that the best way to learn is to teach; and that's why Stack Overflow was valuable for contributors, as a way of honing their skills. Not necessarily for points.

What you need to do, in your organization, is to identify the people who actually care about teaching and learning for their own sake, as opposed to the people who do things for money, and to find a way to promote the people with the inclination to learn and teach into higher positions. Because it shows they aren't greedy, they aren't cheating, and they probably will have your organization's best interests at heart (even if that is completely naïve and they would be better off taking a long vacation - even if they are explicitly the people who claim to dislike your organization the most). I am not talking about people who simply complain. I mean people who show up and do amazing work on a very low level, and teach other people to do it - because they are committed to their jobs. Even if they are completely uneducated.

For me, the only people I trust are people who exhibit this behavior: They do something above and beyond which they manifestly did not need to do, without credit, in favor of the project I'm spending my time on.

>> But then beyond that there are hard/niche questions where the AI's are wrong often and humans also have a hard time getting it right, but with a larger discussion and multiple minds chewing the problem one can get to a more correct answer often by process of elimination.

Humans aren't even good at this, most of the time, but one has to consider AI output to be almost meaningless babble.

May I say that the process of elimination is actually not the most important aspect of that type of meeting. It is the surfacing of things you wouldn't have considered - even if they are eliminated later in debate - which makes the process valuable.