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I know ChatGPT is banned on Stack Exchange. But could an AI tool be used in automation? I mean most of the time I try to find if my question is a duplicate or not before asking the question, and I see a lot of results in the list. But it takes a long time to check which are the most relevant.

It would be helpful for us (especially beginners) if AI could use the Stack Exchange site questions and answers' data to find the most relevant answer to that question before asking. It will definitely prevent duplicate questions being posted.

I'm not an expert so please don't ask me how can it be achieved, that's the engineer's job, I'm just making a request.

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    @ChatGPTStan and how is this related to the question? It is a specific feature request, the labs offer nothing related to it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:00
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    Anyway, a related discussion is: How could AI be used to augment curation tooling?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:01
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    @ShadowTheGPTWizard Hey wait. stackoverflow.co/labs/search is exactly what I want. It's not working now on the Stack Exchange sites. I hope it will be implemented in the near future.
    – Luffy
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:11
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    A while back, I tried to come up with prompts for Bing Chat that would do this (basically, come up with search queries to find duplicates for a given question, run those queries, and give links to likely duplicates). It ... sort of worked, although I had problems getting it to consistently obey my instructions, likely related to Microsoft's (fairly successful) attempts to keep it from producing...let's say, non-brand-safe content. Probably one could get decent results with the fuller control you'd get from using the actual API, assuming you've got the ability to search programmatically.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:11
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    Just running a web search has worked great for me. Why must we GPT everything?
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 23:03
  • Because it saves time. It's time effecient. It's simple as that.
    – Luffy
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 4:01
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    @LeviAckerman Not in my experience. I waste enough hours battling hallucinations, trying to coax sense out of LLMs. Typing the right thing into DDG gets me a reasonable answer instantly, and if it's not the right thing, I can work with it sensibly to adjust. I'm not sure how waiting around for a loading spinner to spew a stream of probabalistic nonsense speeds anything up. Granted, the existing SO search functionality isn't great, but search engines have solved that problem, and SO could fix it with dumb technology the same way if they wanted to.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 13:22
  • It will be an OPTION feature. If you don't want to use, don't use it. I'm not saying that AI will write its own answer. I'm just saying that it will help you find the most relevant answer to your question.
    – Luffy
    Commented Aug 26, 2023 at 13:46
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    @LeviAckerman I don't think making it optional makes it OK--the company still wastes time and money developing it that should be spent on more pressing initiatives, it'll probably cause just as many problems as it solves, and the initiative will probably be used for manipulative/misleading marketing campaigns and to push AI initiatives that are more insidious. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If there's an effective, cheap, dumb solution to a problem, the right decision is to use that rather than throw neural networks at it. The main reason people want overly complex solutions is hype.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 27, 2023 at 18:23
  • @ggorlen May be it's not a good feature for you. But it's great feature for beginners. It'll help beginners to avoid asking duplicate questions. Also, it'll help their time. Not all are so minded. We're not fixing anything here. We're improving something. I'm not doing any AI marketing campaigns. It's just based on problem and solution. That's it. No need to involve politics of marketing in this. It's just to improve user experience and also to avoid duplicate answers.
    – Luffy
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 3:06
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    @LeviAckerman all of your responses are purely anecdotal. You take it for granted that AI is great, has no problems, simply adds value and is apolitical. None of these things are for granted--if you've been using it, witnessing the totally incorrect answers GPT has flooded the site with, following the mod strike or watched how other AI proposals went down, or merely checked the downvotes on this question, you'd question your assumptions a bit more critically. It's a resource-intensive, expensive, frequently incorrect, highly controversial dumpster fire technology, from what I've seen.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 3:08
  • @LeviAckerman Have you seen Preview of Search and Question-Asking Powered by GenAI which predates your proposal? It's pretty clear that the company doesn't really care about fixing search and duplicates, or they'd have done it in innumerable other ways prior to GPT. But once GPT shows up, all of a sudden the company is scrambling to find use cases for it, even for things they ostensibly didn't care about enough to fix prior to GPT.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 3:12
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    @LeviAckerman That's correct, SE has prioritized marketing hype over improving functionality and listening to the community for years, to the detriment of the site. I don't see the benefit in letting people who have no experience or history using the site vote on which features get implemented. From the top link: "Ultimately, this updated search experience should result in fewer duplicate posts on Stack Overflow, provide a supportive onboarding of users through guided question-asking, and overall better quality of questions being asked on Stack Overflow."
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 3:54
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    @LeviAckerman GPT doesn't understand anything. It hallucinates wildly and has been shown to be totally unfit for all other uses it's been suggested for SE. During our discussion, I've been using it unsuccessfully to fix a simple failing test in a legacy project, with no luck. It gives the wrong answer and can't fix it no matter how I prompt it. I've closed hundreds of posts as duplicates and have been using traditional search engines alongside SE for half a decade. This approach is so effective, I've never had to ask a question on SE, and I started using the network as a complete novice.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 4:19
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    @LeviAckerman Hallucinations will occur regardless of the underlying data quality, with hallucinated proof. As I mentioned before, basic searching served me just fine even when I was a beginner (and I still am a beginner in many areas of interest). I don't think GPTs serve beginners well--it takes a good deal of experience to deal with lies. SE investing further into GPTs is a waste of resources. I don't see that you're involved in Stack Overflow, so you may not be aware of the chaos GPTs have unleashed there. We're going in circles and I think I'll let the votes speak for themselves.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Aug 29, 2023 at 5:18

1 Answer 1

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Stack Overflow has announced that it will be using AI. One of these announcements was about OverflowAI (see Announcing OverflowAI). This announcement points to Stack Overflow Labs / OverflowAI? -> https://stackoverflow.co/labs.

From this site the article that looks to be closely related to your "feature-request" is https://stackoverflow.co/labs/search.

Don't be surprised by the downvotes on s. Post having this tag might get downvotes, meaning disagreement.

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  • You're really getting benefits of +1 = -5. Anyways, it will be good to see the AI used on the Stack Exchange website. But ChatGPT is banned here and so is an AI, right? So how did they announce that it will be using AI?
    – Luffy
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:42
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    I think that you might misunderstood the ChatGPT ban. Each site might have a policy about posting content created by using generative AI tools. See Is there a list of ChatGPT or other AI-related discussions and policies for our sites?. The general use of ChatGPT is not banned. As a rule of thumb, don't post ChatGPT responses as answers.
    – ChatGPT Stan
    Commented Aug 25, 2023 at 20:48

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