CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to train the next generation of artificial intelligence.
It’s one of a number of social media platforms grappling with user wariness — and occasional revolts — as they try to adapt to the changes brought by generative AI. Now programmers can simply ask an AI chatbot — some of which are already trained on everything ever posted to Stack Overflow — and it can instantly spit out an answer.
“We quickly addressed it and said, ‘Look, that’s not acceptable behavior’,” said Chandrasekar, describing the protesters as a small minority in the “low hundreds” of the platform's 100 million users. Reddit hasn't tried to punish users who protested — nor could it easily do so given how much say voluntary moderators have on what happens in their specialty forums known as subreddits. But what worries Gilbert, who helps moderate the “AskHistorians” subreddit, is the increasing flow of AI-generated commentary that moderators must decide whether to allow or ban.