Note: This post is not on behalf of the moderators of Ask Ubuntu, although they are welcome to strike as well. I'm also not a diamond moderator.
Tl;dr I'm going on strike. Read the letter and rationale here
Hi! I'm cocomac - I'm often here on Meta AU, but you may have also seen me over on MSE, where I have been regularly posting.
Ask Ubuntu has banned AI-generated content, and that ban has been overall supported by the AU community. More details on that ban and the rationale are in that linked AU post as well as on MSO. Quoting Makyen on MSO,
The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers [...] and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.
Sadly, on MSE, Stack Exchange, Inc. unilaterally determined that moderators across the network are effectively powerless to deal with users that post AI-generated content. That announcement was forced upon all network moderators, and the community was not given a chance to give feedback on that policy prior to it taking place. In addition, moderators were also given different stricter rules to follow than what is public. These additional rules are not public as of now, despite that mods are required to follow them.
This policy, going by what is public, is based on theories and suspicions by SE. They've mentioned data, including a high rate of false-positive suspensions, but have not published any data to support their claims, despite that data being requested, presumably because that data would be nearly impossible to gather and is possibly made up. The moderator team has not been suspending users randomly - they've looked at a number of factors when determining if a user needs a suspention.
Due to this, I am, effective immediately, going on strike across the network until this policy is reverted. This includes flagging posts, reviewing in the queues, etc..
There's a letter that includes many more details. I'd encourage anyone supportive of this to sign it.
