In my understanding, the reason we don't want AI-generated content is that it's garbage - the bot doesn't know the answer to the question, it only knows how to produce answerlike text.
We can delete garbage. Does the answer actually answer the question? Does it make sense? Does it contain false, made up, or irrelevant things? Downvote, delete, flag. Just don't tell me it's AI-generated ;)
I have a lot of respect for you @Zanna See Footnote, but I believe your views on this are missing some key points:
Plagiarism: It's not just about the answer being right-or-wrong (or somewhere in between). Even if the answer is right, someone who posts AI-generated content and passes it off as their own is violating the plagiarism policy here as well. This is true whether they copied the information ChatGPT, Bing Chat, OpenAI, or even Wikipedia, Reddit, or example.com. This is true whether the user copy/pasted or tried to "reword" the AI's answer. We simply don't allow someone to take credit for an answer that they didn't write themselves.
This is the main reason why my proposed AI responsible-use policy starts with Cite as a requirement.
Side-note: Now there are certainly times that citation doesn't necessarily make sense. Most of us here on Ask Ubuntu know that, to set environment variables "permanently", you would do so in your startup files (e.g.
~/.bashrc). But who among us remembers where they learned this in order to be able to cite it if we mention it in an answer? At some point, what we learn becomes part of our "residual knowledge".But that's not the case when using ChatGPT or another AI. The user who posts it knows exactly where the material came from in those cases, and it isn't the user's "knowledge" learned somewhere in the past. It should be cited.
Trust and Reputation: Hand-in-hand with that goes the fact that we are a site built on trust and reputation. We expect someone with reputation in their tags to have some level of expertise. When a user posts AI-content as their own, a good AI-answer will increase that user's reputation, even though that person might not have the necessary subject matter expertise.
That's not right or fair, and it has the potential to destroy the community's trust.
Incentive: The reward-vs-risk for posting AI-generated content is too high based on your proposal. Let's say a user with no expertise posts AI-generated 20 answers:
- 5 of these are "good" answers
- 5 are "so so"
- 10 are bad and get removed
Let's say that the user even gets blocked for a period of time (automatically or via suspension) for repeatedly posting low-quality. But those answers that remain sit here for years to come and can continue to receive upvotes. The user may have even gained a quick 50 rep for those 5 "good" answers - ~ 2 acceptances and 2 upvotes. Then there are additional potential upvotes in the future across all 10 of the answers that remained.
Potential for additional spam: And keep in mind that with 50 rep (which can far more easily be obtained using AI than "normal" methods, IMHO), a spam account can then turn around and post comment spam, of course. Granted, that's not the motivation behind the majority of AI use here, but we know that we have spam accounts who have posted AI content as well.
Difficulty for non-experts to judge the quality: What's worse is that the problem with AI is that the answers sound so "informed" that a new user (often the one posting the question) or an inexperienced one can't tell the difference between a good answer and one with potential issues.
I suspect that many "new user" AI answers are upvoted during the First Answers review queue without a close examination, and I've had one Mod (via private chat) on a low-traffic site confirm that I was right about this (at least in one case) when they wondered how and why an obviously bad, obviously AI answer was upvoted.
An answer being long and grammatically correct doesn't make it right. On the other hand though, let's not assume every long and grammatically correct post is AI garbage!
I think you know that's not how AI answers have been detected here, by any stretch :-). I'm happy to discuss with you privately (e.g. chat, or even Discord if you prefer, and yes I know all mods can see private chat) the techniques I've used if you'd like, but having flagged more than 1,200 suspected AI answers on Stack Overflow, a few here and on Super User, and having over 2,000 GPT answers in my "Saves" list from the three sites, I think I've developed a good sense and set of heuristics to determine AI use. Of course, I freely admit that I am obviously biased, but the Stack Overflow mods, if my "Helpful" flag rate is any indication, at least, seem to agree.
I know you can't see the deleted answers on Stack Overflow, which I think would give you a great sense of a "common" GPT answer, but perhaps I can find some way to share a set with you. On bright (not-so) bright side, there are quite a few undeleted AI answers on Stack Overflow at the moment to work with.
Footnote:
Interesting anecdote - I still remember my first interaction with @Zanna. I called her out for being wrong about making an edit to a post I didn't feel was substantiated. I didn't even notice her Mod diamond, but it didn't matter -- I was wrong (/gulp!), and @Zanna was right. And maybe that's the case here as well. Who knows? ;-)