Recent forum activity

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I'm a bit surprised that there is such a strong activity in recent days on this forum. On one side we should be happy but on the other, they all share similar traits:

- They are all from new accounts created within the last ~24 hours or so with names that look quite made up

- They all tend to be one hit or two hit wonders, which is still questionable

- Their answer is kind of on topic but also at the same time rather generic in some ways

- They all claim to use LabVIEW 2020 and working with LabVIEW since 2015

Are we witnessing a new wave of AI generated spam posts? What could be the purpose?

Edited 20 hours ago by Rolf Kalbermatter

[ShaunR]

AI bot's seem fairly obvious to me, ATM. They don't really understand comma's and lists.

On a different note. I've thought Lavag would be a good place for it's own AI bot. It could link questions to previous resolved answers. Automatically identify cross-posts. Guard against spam bots etc. Lavag.org is a huge resource that could be targeted domain training. Known meat-sacks could upvote and downvote the AI bot's response to train it. Too many downvotes, it disappears from the responses so as to not pollute with stupid responses.

I think lavag could utilise a simple AI as a first interaction support. The expertise of a years worth of LabVIEW (experienced intern). A users question is usually a much better search criteria than the site search where you need to know the keywords.
 

Edited 19 hours ago by ShaunR

[JKSH]

20 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

- Their answer is kind of on topic but also at the same time rather generic in some ways

Being on-topic is easy for an LLM to achieve. Being useful is harder, and that definitely hasn't been achieved in this case.

So it's just time-wasting slop.
 

20 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Are we witnessing a new wave of AI generated spam posts? What could be the purpose?

Probably. Same purpose(s) as all other spambots, just using new tools: Either they will edit their posts later to insert spam links, or they're just vandalizing for the sake of it.

 

18 hours ago, ShaunR said:

On a different note. I've thought Lavag would be a good place for it's own AI bot. It could link questions to previous resolved answers. Automatically identify cross-posts. Guard against spam bots etc. Lavag.org is a huge resource that could be targeted domain training. Known meat-sacks could upvote and downvote the AI bot's response to train it. Too many downvotes, it disappears from the responses so as to not pollute with stupid responses.

That would indeed be putting AI to much better use.
 

18 hours ago, ShaunR said:

I think lavag could utilise a simple AI as a first interaction support. The expertise of a years worth of LabVIEW (experienced intern). A users question is usually a much better search criteria than the site search where you need to know the keywords.

This part has harmful side-effects. Software community forums everywhere are shrivelling up, and I bet that one big reason is because people now talk to bots more, and talk to each other less.

Sure, this makes answers more readily accessible, but the costs are:

• The loss of motivation to learn how to ask questions well.
• The loss of opportunities to share our knowledge with others directly.
• The loss of human networking in general.

These activities have intrinsic social value beyond just acquiring information.

Edited 44 minutes ago by JKSH