Update: Effective August 2nd 2023, the Arqade Moderators have concluded striking.
Effective June 5th 2023, Arqade Moderators are on strike.
An open letter from the community moderators can be found here, and should you wish to express your stance as well, you can sign the letter (you will be prompted to authenticate through Stack Exchange). The letter details the strike and the actions that moderators will no longer be performing until a satisfactory agreement is reached.
What happened?
If you've been using Arqade or any SE site over the last few months, you will have probably seen the on-going struggle with AI/Chat GPT and its usage on the Stack Exchange sites. In general, most sites have banned use of AI/Chat GPT generated posts. Arqade's stance generally agrees with this with our exception is if you did use AI to write your post or a portion of it, that you explicitly cite which part of your post is AI generated and have verified that what the AI has generated is true.
In practice, I've personally never seen this as the case whenever a user posts an AI generated answer.
Much of the details around the strike are laid out in this Meta SE post. The ultimate catalyst to this strike is because of this information found in this post:
On May 29th, 2023 (a major holiday for moderators in the US, CA, UK, and possibly other locations), a post was made by a CM on the private Stack Moderators Team. This post, with a title mentioning “GPT detectors”, focused on the rate of inaccuracy experienced by automated detectors aiming to identify AI- and specifically GPT-generated content - something that moderators were already well aware of and taking into account.
This post then went on to require an immediate cessation of issuing suspensions for AI-generated content and to stop moderating AI-generated content on that basis alone, affording only one exceptionally rare case in which it was permissible to delete or suspend for AI content. It was received extremely poorly by the moderators, with many concerns being raised about the harm it would do.
...
The new policy overrode established community consensus and previous CM support, was not discussed with any community members, was presented misleadingly to moderators and then even more misleadingly in public, and is based on unsubstantiated claims derived from unreviewed and unreviewable data analysis. Moderators are expected to enforce the policy as it is written in private, while simultaneously being unable to share the specifics of this policy as it differs from the public version.
You can find the "public version" of this policy here as posted by SE staff.
If you want to read even more into it, there is a Chat GPT tag on Meta SE that should have a plethora of posts you can read. Some notable ones:
- Why wasn't the guidance to moderators on how to moderate AI Generated content made publicly available?
- Sustainability of new AI generated content policy
- Discussion: Network policy regarding AI Generated content
- GPT on the platform: Data, actions, and outcomes
While writing this post, SE staff have posted a statement on the strike here.