Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real-ish, as real as Reddit can be) it is stark, people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

Writing and videos produced before 2022 are the information equivalent of low-background steel (steel produced before the atom bomb era). Not all are precious, but they are important. AI influences are so pervasive at this point, even in informational writing from domain experts.

Relentless grounding is my personal solution for my AI epistemic crisis, but it's an expensive solution in terms of time and effort, and triage is hard too.

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off. they get very mad and ive had some even use ai to tell me why that's wrong.

what differentiates you? you could tell me "type xyz into chatgpt" or even share a structured document link from their site. but when you're copy/pasting, then you're basically useless in the equation.

There are some people I'm not friends with anymore who didn't understand conversational bidding. They would jump straight to Why Don't You Google That and shut down any conversation we might have had.

Yes I could get some of this information off of IMDB or a DIY video but I'm looking for color commentary and regional advice, and also in some of these situations, the people I asked know me. They know the sorts of things I don't need help on and the ones I struggle with. So maybe they can tell me this movie or trick isn't for me and I should try this other thing instead. Or which store I should go to for this.

I have seen that many times here on HN: "I don't know but I stuck this in CrapGPT and this is what it said...".

I would encourage anyone considering a reply like this to ask themselves what value they have brought to the table over the OP using AI themselves.

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage.

Most of the advice and information subreddits I previously visited collapsed into bad posting even before AI.

The few I still follow are oddly fine.

The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate. Once the subreddit gets past a critical mass of junk-posting users, the good users leave and there's no coming back.

I think some may think they're helping like that, but I'm sure there are quite a few who enjoy the feeling of being a notable figure in the community because they answer so many questions.

These people have always existed and gave bad answers, but now they can do it so much faster, and with so much less actual thinking.

We had to officially set the culture in the work slack. If you're just piping through raw AI response without any input of your own, you're being rude.

It goes a long way.

I remember reading a travel thing a long time ago (before gps was a thing).

They cautioned that in some cultures, if you asked for directions, people would rather be polite/helpful and give you an answer rather than saying "I don't know" and giving you no answer. (They recommended that you ask more than one person to be more certain you were getting good directions)

In other cultures they were more likely to say "I don't know" at the cost of seeming more impolite.

So, we don't know the intent. :)

And then the AI gets trained on the advice and information subreddits, and we see an exponential growth downwards in quality?

Reddit has always had the dynamic of people misrepresenting their knowledge and just repeating what other people said on that subreddit. I find myself doing that when I spend too long on there - posting very authoritatively on something I'm honestly clueless about.

One big pet peeve of mine on reddit is on any kind of immigration-related subreddit it is absolutely filled with people talking about how it's impossible to migrate and you'll never get a visa. Yet, meanwhile, people do migrate successfully and legally all the time.

It gets better. Kagi search summary likes "people also say..." and then refers to a random LLM reddit thread.

When there's weakness in not knowing, it's no surprise. How many of us work in a corporate environment where pretending to know is better than being honest about not knowing?

Why limit this critique to one side of the reddit marketplace. If more and more answers are AI authored, it stands to reason more and more questions are as well.

And let's not forget that the bots doing most of the upvoting and downvoting are more likely to upvote bot comments, driving the algorithm.

The internet as a public forum is dead. And given the purpose of something is what it does, this is the true goal of AI. I'm certain blowing up the internet benefits very many wealthy and powerful people.

Reddit has been trash for a very long time. But you know it's worse, because you get punished for criticizing AI comments on those subreddits.

Exactly the same thing happened when Google appeared on the scene. (Not that this makes it any better!)

I had to exit the major Home Assistant facey groups due to this behavior.

That and all the stupid questions.

You mean like this? https://xkcd.com/903/

I mean that's this entire thread in a nutshell. Armchair experts emboldened by their $100 ChatGPT University Diploma.

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage

>but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight.

>people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

What? This is a joke right? Advice and information subreddits have been shallow blind leading blind crap like that and have been for at least a decade. The vote mechanism plus local culture rewards shallow "teennager just googled it" type responses (that AI is basically replacing here) that even people who don't know anything can agree on and punishes nuance and serious understanding.

Eventually the people who know their shit make a joke subreddit (which is inherently exclusive because you can't joke about something without knowing about it) and then at some point later people figure out that's where all the smart people are, start asking questions there instead and then it goes to shit in the same way.

AI is absolutely a lateral move here.

The advice subreddits were absolutely horrible before AI. The entire 2016-2024 period was utter madness there, likely as a result of globalization. As AI gets smarter, it may make the comments better, sadly!

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