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AI Is Causing Signal Collapse Everywhere All at Once (thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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AI can cheaply fake almost every signal we traditionally used to judge quality. I now see this pattern everywhere, in open source, in education, in research, all breaking at the same time. I find signaling theory useful for diagnosing what is happening and why it is so disorienting, and signaling theory and adjacent literature can provide the vocabulary to discuss possible solutions.

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[–] 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I agree you don't know if the AI is working in your your best interest. But at the same time you don't know if the person answering your StackOverflow question, is acting in your best interest either. They could just be racking up SO points to unlock more mod powers.

If you're saying that AI centralizes power, then I agree with you.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    That said, unlike answers from an LLM, SO answers are available for public review and scrutiny (for better or worse) which can filter out unhelpful answers.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago

    If there can be a lot of benefit from a public LLM Q&A forum (where you ask LLMs questions but everything is public), then I'm sure somebody would build it. Maybe somebody is building it now. So what your talking about is not an issue with LLMs, but rather the current toolset for using them.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago*

    Yeah not to say StackExchange was a perfect answer either. It was the best we had. I frequently grated against their community guidelines for posting things, especially when somebody would mark a question as duplicate but then linked to something completely fucking unrelated. Developers can be curmudgeonly shits sometimes.

    But it was far more trustworthy than what we have now. Cuz you can bet even if they were being smug shits, the people writing answers on SE were trying to be more correct than everybody else and prove it.

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