There's something here that I can't put my finger on. Sites like ServerFault (and the rest of the trilogy in tfa) were places where people like the author literally, and pretty silently dramatically improved my life. I owe such a great debt to what looks like the end of the end for these places. A sad moment where the machines just sliced everything up and took over.
I wouldn't say terrible, and even the most reliable people have bad days. I think the difference is when you are dealing with people, you don't get a generic "you're absolutely right" when you point at a mistake.
Sometimes you get an apology, sometimes you get a wall of ego, sometimes you get reverse-corrected etc., instead of a statistically significant "remedy". This is totally not efficient, but if life should be all about efficiency, we should never live at all.
I’ve spent a lot of time chasing really plausible sounding explanations from AI. I’ve also saved a lot of time by having AI give me immediate, correct answers for problems I can only vaguely describe. The reason I call it a terrible source is that it doesn’t “know” which is which, so it can’t favor the accurate content.
StackExchange could always “learn” to favor accurate answers with social queues; votes, poster rep, etc.. IMHO it’s far more reliable than AI.
And, note, that perhaps - even more of those social interactions will also be absorbed, along with the participants, into the Chat model's sphere. It wants, and will get, all: Result(s), process, and participants. It is grey goo for all intellectual - and soon, emotional - work and products and inputs and byproducts.-
half my working knowledge came from forum threads exactly like these. weird era to watch the whole thing get strip-mined for training data while the places themselves rot.
I'm not questioning if AI delivers, it does, and you need - cannot say it more politely - a reality check if you think it's completely useless.
It's just that we are social creatures and those communities provided more than just technical answers to many.
Being able to judge the reliability of the source was huge. AI is a great discovery engine, but a terrible source for reliable information.
Sometimes you get an apology, sometimes you get a wall of ego, sometimes you get reverse-corrected etc., instead of a statistically significant "remedy". This is totally not efficient, but if life should be all about efficiency, we should never live at all.
StackExchange could always “learn” to favor accurate answers with social queues; votes, poster rep, etc.. IMHO it’s far more reliable than AI.
And: nice domain name.