I saw it only to be come the start of a discussion full of complaints that has nothing to do with the question at hand. If your comment is valuable, add it to the /a answer.
@JourneymanGeek "dodge fast when you put the baby in the bathwater"?
@M.A.R. got enough of this here, thank you very much. :D
@ElementsInSpace yeah generally speaking, looks like comments moderation got a big uptick with the, ah, new mods. I never considered my comments to be something permanent, even those I consider "useful", so I have no problem with that. Less "ranty" comments arounds does give the place a cleaner look. ;)
@JNat troll on the roll. No rush, but better nuke the accounts, on all sites I've seen this user post pure nonsense. (rep most likely from dirty socks)
We permit GenAI content on Physics.SE, but it must be disclosed. Otherwise, we treat it as plagiarism. Today, we had a new guy post 9 extensive answers in a very short timespan. Even 1 answer of that size should take an hour or two, especially if you check your facts against reliable references. Hell, just typing up that much MathJax is time consuming. But this guy was popping out new answers over a very wide range of topics every 20 minutes or so.
I call that "Low Quality Troll", probably the ancient predecessor of the modern GenAI trolls. :P
@PM2Ring depends, only if they're smart then they can post things that actually look legit and have some value, but many times they fail even that and it's easy enough to detect it's obvious trolling.
But yeah, those cases can be tricky, and there can be false positives.
I admit having such false positive myself, couple of times.
So I try to be more careful and treat only the obvious cases as obvious trolling.
The answers were superficially good, although they do have some weird repetition, like you often see with long passages from a LLM. But it was pretty sophisticated stuff, and you really need to be an expert in that topic to tell that it doesn't really make sense. But it's very unlikely for anyone to be an e xpert in all the topics he was covering.
@ShadowWizard Some of Asim's posts look kinda of ok, but most of them have something silly, or they're just full-on nonsense, eg dupes of existing answers but with random words replaced with totally unrelated words. Or just keyboard mashing.
@ShadowWizard Yeah. If he just posted 1 a day, nobody would have noticed. But he got greedy.
And a few days before, we had another guy who'd been a member for 3 years, with no (undeleted) posts, who suddenly posted 4 huge answers in 18 minutes.
I really hope this isn't a new trend. But I fear we'll see more of it as more powerful LLMs become available. I guess we don't see much of it yet because the really powerful LLMs aren't cheap, and people who can afford those subscription fees have better things to do than to flood Stack Exchange sites...
@ShadowWizard It's a mystery. Sure, that guy today scored a lot of points, before the mods suspended him & deleted all his answers.
I guess it's a quick way to get privileges (if you don't get caught). But people will soon learn that you don't really know what you're talking about. So such a plan doesn't really go anywhere. And Physics.SE rep points are pretty meaningless off-site. It's not like SO, where other IT people recognise the value of SO rep.
The other day a bunch of uni students (from a bunch of different European universities) were in the Physics chatroom. They said they didn't know anyone else in their class who'd even heard of Physics Stack Exchange.
@ShadowWizard They are all regular members of Physics.SE, but each one said they're they only one in their class who knows about Stack Exchange. I don't know how they originally found it.
@PM2Ring Well, with the company culture these days, you could ask yourself why anyone would want to recommend SE sites to people.
I used to specifically recommend SO to fellow students new at the university, for learning, (explicitly warned against posting questions until they’d understood the basics and were on to something there’d not be a duplicate for).
Haven’t recommended anyone these sites in a long time, and if somebody ever brings them up, I make sure to tell them about the company so that they don’t waste their sorry souls here.
Although I do tend to link genAI victims to the «funny» Meta Q/As on the topic, around here.
@PM2Ring Yep, it's pretty sad what this place turned into. I don't think any one of us pictured that when we found it and fell in love with, well, what it used to be.
