Does the strike letter oppose AI?

I read this question very carefully, and as someone who helped draft the "The problem with AI-generated content" in the initial moderation strike post, I wanted to chime in a bit.

I personally don't hate AI by any means, and I signed the strike letter. Mithical, one of the representatives who is conversing with SE about the strike and who is a moderator on Artificial Intelligence (of all things...), likely also doesn't hate AI (though you could probably do some mental gymnastics and figure they are somehow hate-moderating that site or something). I think I can speak for a lot of people who signed the letter by saying... We don't hate AI. The potential for AI to help all of us in a variety of tasks, including curating SE, is quite high. A lot of us also, myself included, were actually quite interested in this example of generative AI on SE. Now... It kinda grew into a little bit of a dumpster fire, but the bones of a good idea were certainly there, they just need some refinement. Well, maybe a lot of refinement...

The strike isn't about AI... Not really, anyway. It's about the lack of communication between SE and its supposedly trusted userbase about issues that directly affect us. terdon did a great summary about the problems, but I wanted to highlight one more: The ban on AI content had widespread community support, and continued to have widespread community support across the damn network. Why, oh why, would you strip away that decision from the community via an edict from on-high? That's why I signed. This was the single most anti-community action since the Monica debacle, and it just continues to get worse as time wears on.

So, look... By signing the letter, you're not saying you hate AI, even if it's caused a lot of us some headaches here on SE, especially on SO. You're just saying that you're unhappy with how things came to this point, how it's continuing to go, and that we need to have a chat about it.

I was involved in the drafting of the letter and have been part of the strike since the beginning and, frankly, AI is the least of my worries. My main issues are:

1. The company is breaking their promises to us. Again. They are showing that when they sign an agreement, what they mean is that the other side should be bound by that agreement, but not them.

2. The company is slandering moderators. Again. They are accusing us of being so dumb as to rely on AI detector software which, as anyone who's used them will know, simply don't work very well. Which is why we never relied on them.

   They are also accusing us of wrongly suspending users. If true, this is very serious, and we need to know about it so we can apologize to the affected users and ensure it doesn't happen again. However, they have yet to show one single example of a wrong suspension. I kid you not, they haven't shown any of us, any mod across the network, a single incorrect suspension over AI.

   This, by the way, is a problem in and of itself. Moderators are human, and of course we make mistakes. Given the number of sites and users and the number of suspensions issued across the entire network, you would expect some to be wrong even by pure chance. If you can't find any wrong suspensions, that means you haven't bothered to look. So the company feels it is easier to accuse than to actually sit down and check for themselves.

3. The company has imposed quality criteria on the sites. This is a new level of over-reach, one that has never been seen before and one that goes against the founding principle of all SE network sites to be "run by us, the community". If the company tells us what constitutes a "good" question or answer for us, then the sites are no longer run by a community of users but are instead run by a for-profit entity for its own ends.

   On top of that, the specific quality criteria they imposed are just nonsensical and basically force us to allow AI generated crap, even blindingly obvious AI generated crap, with all the issues that you point out in your question, on the sites.

All this to say that while the specifics of the AI policy triggered the strike, the problems run much deeper, so no, I cannot see how it makes sense for anyone to interpret a signature on the strike letter as a vote against AI in general. Artificial intelligence can be an amazing tool if used well and in the right context. I personally am less convinced about LLMs like chatGPT, but even they, despite their current limitations, clearly have huge potential. I don't want them to be answering posts on SE, mind you, I come here to get human experts answering my questions, but that doesn't mean the tools themselves are bad.

Thinking that I might be involved here, I'll offer my perspective.

I signed the letter because I am in complete opposition to the company's latest moderation decision to prevent moderators from getting rid of AI-generated content.

At its heart is a familiar blight that I've seen in these interactions - an utter failure to communicate with the community that is claimed to be so treasured and valued. At least, that's what's written about us in blog posts and such. We're beloved as long as we're on the same page.

My firm belief is that Stack Overflow's value as a network is in the quality of its posts. For there to be a network, good answers are a must. By preventing moderators from removing AI-generated answers (which are by no metric "good" in any way), the value of the network is diminished in my eyes.

By and large, the network has rejected the use of AI in their content. So a decision - that doesn't have a lot of particularly strong statistics behind it, by the way - that is completely the opposite of what the community is actually saying is something I fundamentally oppose. I don't really want to accuse anyone of lying, but it's a hard sell for me to believe that the circumstances around this decision are entirely truthful and honest.

I do want to circle back on the "blight" I had mentioned earlier. Honestly it feels like all of us in this mire never really advance beyond some kind of uneasy "truce" after something a bit crazy happens. It's been escalating slowly and slowly ever since the Summer of Love, where the company's decisions were for the most part a bit rushed but no big deal at first, then with increasing escalations just not involving the community that is claimed to be at the heart of all of this.

I've posited that they probably mean a different "community" than the community I'm seeing, but... not much I can do about that.

Anyhow, the letter itself isn't saying "AI is evil, ban AI" or anything along those lines. Signing it doesn't pigeonhole you into that perspective.

Personally I think it's fine for a tool, but the use cases that the company wants to advance to help the community feel like they'd add more to our workload, with needing to check if a title makes sense to begin with (because the OP who uses that tool can't do it themselves) and whatever in the hallucinated heck this tool was when trying to suggest formatting edits (which, again, the person who would use this tool a lot isn't the sort of person who would pay a lot of attention to these kinds of edits, which is actively harmful to the quality of the site).

I would say it is a specific issue we are concerned by.

It's less about the "rules on AI" or "AI" than the moderation teams requesting guidance, being told to do it ourselves, then overruled without warning.

The social contract was "We'll take care of our communities, you help us when we need it" and certain other considerations.

However, in the face of systemic issues, we'll never get back to moderating our communities if we wait for perfect or good enough. We've had issues we've brought up that probably predate most of the community team, or maybe even most employees.

We've been aware of worse engagement, finding it hard to replace core community members who left, and discoverability issues with various aspects of the platform. We've asked for better representation in the company - and even spoken out against how the company treats its staff. We can't fix that now.

Showing the company trusts us on this issue, however can be a starting point.

It could be a good many other issues, but this is what we have now, and we need to know the company's willing to put aside its, well hubris, to trust that we know what we're doing, and communicate as equals.

We don't oppose AI. We feel cynical use of AI tools for answers will dilute the quality of information here and cause both short and long term issues for future users. We'd like to be trusted to take care of our communities. That's not a big thing to ask, when we've been doing it for years.

To answer this question, I find it inescapable to consider the highly upvoted answer it mentions, and in particular the passage from it you find objectionable.

This is just so tone-deaf to everything the community is saying about AI.

You couldn't be more disconnected from reality if you tried here. So many of the network sites are rejecting AI. There's a whole strike on because of how hard y'all are pushing AI.

While I can't speak for Makoto, the natural way to read this passage is to take it as referring to events that have transpired in SE, so that:

• "everything the community is saying about AI" refers to the views condensed in the letter;

• "So many of the network sites are rejecting AI" refers to the policies actually adopted by network sites to avoid being overwhelmed by unverified AI-generated posts; and

• "how hard y'all are pushing AI" refers to the company making the policies mentioned above ineffectual, which is a direct reason for the strike.

(With respect to the third point, one might object that the mere neutering of the policies doesn't qualify as "pushing" anything. However, the whole set of AI-related initiatives currently being prioritised by the company are a possible frame for making sense of the neutering, even if they weren't the triggers for the strike. Regardless of whether such a frame is ultimately correct, adopting it is well within Makoto's remit as the author of the answer.)

The overarching theme, therefore, keeps being the AI-related policy decisions by the company that affect the operation of the sites and the workings of their communities.

Now, if one has broader concerns about AI, and in particular concerns about overzealous deployment without due regard for externalities and side-effects, it wouldn't be surprising for them to interpret the current events at SE under that lens. These broader topics are not addressed by the letter, as the answers by terdon and Spevacus note, and so various views about them are compatible with signing it. The flip side is that signatories of the letter are free to comment on the situation at SE in a way that is framed by their broader views about AI without fear of somehow tainting by association all the other signatories.

Summing it up: there is no reason to extrapolate from an answer written by a single person to however many other signatories there are, and your signature is not being reinterpreted.

There are two "mostly separate but not completely" issues at work here.

First is the strike.
We can lie all day if we really want to but the strike trigger, the final straw, was a policy about the moderation of post generated using simple text generators (with ChatGPT being the most common one and the name that everyone used).
I won't repeat all the reasons here, basically users are concerned that the network would be polluted by grammatically correct text that has no guarantee of being meaningful or to not contain unreal, made up things.

On the other side we have a company obsession with AI.
The generated content policy is just a part of a bigger picture. AI generated post edit suggestions, alleged monetization of the data dump, firing people and redirecting resources to side project like an AI research and demo site... all contribute to make users quite angry.

You can get where this is going:

• You have users who are just angry about the misuse of a text generator as a knowledge extraction tool (those exist but ChatGPT is not one of them).
• You have users that are angry about the fact that the company is directing resources to AI at the cost of firing people while ignoring all the small usability requests that are on hold since 6-8 years B.C.
• And you have people that hate AI technology with passion and consider them to be the new "Internet of [redacted] (warning - twitter link)".

The first group could be actually interested and willing to help on the new site, the second group will probably see it as the next resource leech and hate you for helping and the third one will hate you because AI.

All the three groups probably signed the letter. But they are not the same.

I upvoted your question because I agree that this is something we should clarify. However, I don't think the downvotes generally indicate a general adversity towards AI in general. And I'm afraid your formulation is somewhat problematic.

• Some users will no doubt downvote to indicate that they do not agree with the final question, i.e. to indicate that they do not agree that the strike letter is an indication of a deeper skepticism towards AI.

• Some users may well be downvoting because, as a matter of fact, bringing up this topic can very well be construed as an attempt to splinter our unity. In fact, casting doubt over the very simple and straightforward analysis of the actual text of the strike letter you provided yourself seems like something the company would do to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt on the strike and the motivations of the participants.

• Certainly, many of us are deeply skeptical of the company's sudden turn to jump into the current hype around large language models, and how they ended up offending the community in the process; and some might have downvoted to express this limited form of specific, limited "AI skepticism."

• Finally, I'm sure there as a small fringe of downvoters who genuinely hate AI in all its forms. This is hard to grasp for the rest of us, but after all, there are also people who insist that the Earth is flat, etc.