Community Moderator Strike

Question

Update: Effective August 2^nd 2023, the Arqade Moderators have concluded striking.

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Effective June 5^th 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.

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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

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While writing this post, SE staff have posted a statement on the strike here.

Answer 1

It's unfortunate that it's come to this.

As a frequent Arqade contributor, thank you for informing us of your decision. I can tell that it took a lot of thought for you all to come together and collectively decide to join the strike.

However as one of the folks who helped draft the Meta SE/Meta SO post, the person who raised the point of AI content on Arqade being potentially problematic, and a big contributor to Charcoal's anti-spam efforts (which is also on strike), I wanted to personally say thanks for coming together to help make our voices heard in response to the most recent changes and decisions made by SE. My genuine hope is that our plea for transparency doesn't fall on deaf ears, and that we can work things out with the company to achieve a happy conclusion for all of us.