{"id":19742,"date":"2023-06-15T10:22:30","date_gmt":"2023-06-15T17:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19742"},"modified":"2023-06-15T10:22:48","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T17:22:48","slug":"stack-exchange-moderators-on-strike-over-ai-related-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2023\/06\/15\/stack-exchange-moderators-on-strike-over-ai-related-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Stack Exchange moderators on strike over AI-related issues"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>A bunch of Stack Exchange moderators have gone on strike because the company is telling them not to moderate AI-generated posts.<\/p>\r\n<p>There are a bunch of complicated and nuanced aspects to the situation. Here\u2019s my understanding of what\u2019s going on, but I\u2019m not an expert (and I\u2019m biased toward believing the moderators):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>AI-generated material often looks superficially good, so readers often give it upvotes; but it often includes made-up material that isn\u2019t immediately obviously wrong.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Moderators have been using various signals\/indicators to help them identify material as AI-generated. For example, if they see a user post several multi-paragraph posts within a few seconds, they get suspicious.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Moderators have not been relying much (if at all) on automated AI detectors, because those detectors aren\u2019t very accurate.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Some moderators say that after seeing enough AI-generated material, they start to be able to identify it easily. They\u2019ve suggested that the company could test them on this, using known-AI-generated and known-human-generated material, but so far the company has declined to do so.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Moderators have been suspending users who appear to be posting AI-generated material.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The company declared that moderators must stop suspending users for posting AI-generated material. (The company didn\u2019t consult with the moderators before issuing this policy.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>Moderators have gone on strike, refusing to do moderation, in protest of that policy.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The company has been posting initially-reasonable-seeming explanations of where it\u2019s coming from, but moderators have been responding by pointing out the flaws in the company\u2019s reasoning and methodology. For example, the company keeps pointing out that the detectors are inaccurate; the moderators keep responding by saying that they\u2019re not relying on the detectors.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The company receives appeals of suspensions, and because the moderators don\u2019t have concrete evidence that the material was definitely AI-generated, the company is having a hard time justifying the suspensions.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The company says that certain demographics, including users from certain countries, are more likely to get suspended by moderators for supposedly posting AI-generated material.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The company seems to be indirectly claiming that a lot of the material that moderators are saying is AI-generated really isn\u2019t. This seems to imply that the company believes it has a method of identifying AI-generated material that\u2019s more accurate than what the moderators are doing, but the company hasn\u2019t explained what their method is.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>\u2026And there\u2019s lots more to the situation than that; in particular, there\u2019s background tension between moderators and the company over past situations and actions. But I feel like the above covers the core of the current situation (bearing in mind again that I\u2019m not an expert in any of this).<\/p>\r\n<p>Here are some links:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li><a href=\"https:\/\/openletter.mousetail.nl\">Open letter from moderators about why they\u2019re striking<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n  <li><a href=\"https:\/\/meta.stackexchange.com\/questions\/389811\/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an\">More background<\/a>.<\/li>\r\n  <li><a href=\"https:\/\/meta.stackexchange.com\/questions\/390106\/moderation-strike-update-data-dumps-choosing-representatives-gpt-data-and-wh\">Latest update on the situation<\/a>, posted a few days ago.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-updates"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19742"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19744,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19742\/revisions\/19744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}