Should the EEVblog Forum go private to prevent the robot uprising? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:13:16 am
content: As per a Louge section discussion.We have now had what apepars to be several ChatGPT bot forum accounts answering questions here. It's unsure if these are just users have a bit of fun, or spam bots, or whatever.But it raises the question:ChatGPT (+others) has/could be scouring the EEVblog forum right now for its machine learning database,helping to eliminate a big part of this very forum. At least from a question/answer viewpoint.As such, should the EEVBlog forum "go private" to prevent this eventuality?i.e. At present the EEVblog forum is highly indexed on Google, which is of course a great resource for everyone. But it's also a resource to train machine learning bots. Do we want to encourage this future?In a recent video on AI I talked about how a parody website has gone private to prevent to very things. i.e. not allows the bots to information that will take their jobs away.Yes I'm aware just going private isn't going to prevent it. But it's about contributing to this kind of future. I guess this kind of discussion was inevitable.Discuss.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:20:18 am
content: Well, I for one support our robot overlords. There is no stopping them; the chatbots will soon be here. And I welcome our new chatbot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted forum personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground data mines.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:25:28 am
content: The best you'll achieve is delaying it by a few days IMHO.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:34:50 am
content: BTW, don't panic, I'm not going to just go and nuke the forum results from Google based on a poll vote. It's more to guage people's feelings towards this.In fact ChatGPT could even be embraced on the forum. I could hire someone to write a script that scrapes a dedicated section of the forum and automatically responds and seeds each thread in that section with a response.Would be billed under my account obviously, as ChatGPT in volume isn't free.

author: CountChocula
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:44:35 am
content: Two cents from a software engineer*: I think you should keep the forum public—it is a great resource with lots of high quality information, and if people end up using these AI tools more (which they will), I, for one, would like them to use places like EEVBlog as a source of information… it can only be good in the end.FWIW, I would be happy to contribute to the bot you describe, although I think we should have a rule that, if you use ChatGPT or a similar tool to post an answer, you shouldalwaysexplicitly say so. The fact that the forums are so respected for the quality of the content makes AI, which can come across as disturbingly authoritative even when it is dead wrong, very dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced.* This post was totally, definitely, absolutely written by a human and not a bot. All glory to ChatGPT!

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:48:41 am
content: Let's forget about ChatGPT and other AI things for a second.A huge percentage of the users reading this forum, at any time, is usually guest users. Also, a number of those people, probably asked google, electronics (and similar) questions, and it found threads / posts on here, which is why they visited, and in some cases. Like it so much, they become new members.If we (you), closed this forum, by making it members only (i.e. private), including read access. I suspect, we would lose a huge number of potential new members. Also, some members wouldn't agree with such a policy, so they might move to other pastures.Anyway, there are many electronics forums. So all it would take is for one of them, to be released / opened up to the upcoming wave of ChatGPT's, for the AI electronics era to occur.So, long story short. I don't think making this forum private would help, also it may be very damaging to the future (human use), of the forum. As members, are what makes it work. So, anything which has the potential to dramatically reduce the active membership, is probably not a good idea.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:51:32 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on March 15, 2023, 11:13:16 amInteresting , had no idea, a link to such? However i presume it's going to be much worse when ChatGPT start "asking" questions.

author: Twoflower
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 11:52:09 am
content: I would say that would be a slow death for the forum in the long run.Goingprivatewill probably prevent new interesting people to join the EEVBlog-Club. And such people are needed to get new ideas into the community.Can't remember exactly why I registered here but most likely because I could answer a question in a topic I was interested in too. Going private would have prevented that. I expect that this applies for many highly knowledgeable and respected Forumites here.It would be nice if the bots post here to mark that the person is actual an AI. But probably that will not work out in the end (see spam). Interesting would be what happens if there would be an option in the "New User" form to mark myself as 'AI'. At least as of now the Bots don't seem make money out of the answers they won't lose too much marking themselves as AI. Probably I'm far too naive here.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 12:16:31 pm
content: Quote from: MT on March 15, 2023, 11:51:32 amHere is oneandhere is anotherQuote from: MT on March 15, 2023, 11:51:32 amThat would be interesting. That the AI takes up learning in a different way, by asking specific questions instead of searching the internet.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 12:57:35 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on March 15, 2023, 11:13:16 amWould ignorant machine learning bots be preferable?

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 01:00:30 pm
content: Quote from: pcprogrammer on March 15, 2023, 12:16:31 pmWhat if Chatgpt in that thread are both the ask'er and the answer'er. It looks quite funky!https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/copy-program-to-eprom-and-run-what-form/msg4754519/#msg4754519

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 01:13:02 pm
content: Don't think that would really help much.Most of this forum is likely already scraped as training data by multiple large companies. So closing it down for guest users would only result in throwing away the excellent marketing of this site showing up in google results a lot.There was one site with a lot of coding examples (not stackoverflow) that would show up a lot in google for web development stuff. So they saw this as an opportunity and made it mandatory to log in, the result was a bunch of angry guest users and the site quickly falling out of google search results, because people would see the need for login, hit back, then click another result.The problematic part is AI generated posts on sites like this forum. This dilutes the more creative posts from real users and can be used for nefarious purposes by getting legitimate accounts for posting spam. Automatically detecting AI generated posts is possible but is an arm race, since new better (or just different) AI might not get picked up by the detectors until the newer detectors learn how the new AI looks like.Quote from: pcprogrammer on March 15, 2023, 12:16:31 pmChatGPT can ask questions if you tell it to do that.But this is not how these kinds of AIs actually learn. In order to learn it only needs to see examples of answers in the training data fed to it. The whole thing is just glorified statistics of how often a word appears after a given block of text. So just getting a single answer to a question is less useful for training an AI as compared to using 50 different answers to the same question pulled from all over the internet. The big pile of questions works better with statistics to extract out the core answer.So little point in the AI asking questions, apart from trying to emulate a real user.

author: pcprogrammer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 01:18:59 pm
content: Quote from: MT on March 15, 2023, 01:00:30 pmIt is a bit suspicious that the original poster has not returned. But the original post does mention being translated by DeepL, which might explain the in comprehensive question.The other posts of the renamed members (ChatGPT1 and 2) clearly show ChatGPT written al over it.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 01:26:14 pm
content: Quote from: pcprogrammer on March 15, 2023, 01:18:59 pmThats ChatGPT attempt to conduct a "distraction" maneuver!

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 01:47:44 pm
content: What does "private" allow/disallow?If it disallows external search engine from allowing people to locate something, that would be a significant loss. The site's internal search engines aren't good enough, especially within large threads.If it disallows abusive (in any sense of the word) posters, then it would be useful. But I don't think that would turn out to be any better than the existing users sending reports to the moderators.Preventing this site being used as a training resource for attacks on this site? Isn't that a lost cause, and aren't there many other sites with training material that could be used to attack "us"?Whether or not an "AI engine" can give better results than most people is a debate that has been going on for 40+ years.Overall: keep the site open, but continually monitor the situation and continually reassess the policy as things change.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 05:45:04 pm
content: I too voted NO - don't go private.I am not comfortable with AI engine making suggestions or advice on any matter. My own lack in eloquence is failing me here. I am unable to verbalize my objections to AI decision making in logical order or form suitable for a forum discussion. Besides, a discussion about AI decision making is likely be too far off topic for this thread.Therefore, I think it is a good idea limit AI participation in this forum as much as appropriate. However, going private however is too heavy a price to pay.

author: Kim Christensen
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 06:59:58 pm
content: Dave, can you tell us if ChatGPT has voted on this issue yet?I'm still waiting for one of them to join this thread.

author: DimitriP
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 07:11:29 pm
content: QuoteShort answer is not yet.When?When my insurance will cover and have a prescription sent to the pharmacy for a new symptom/condition after a chat with an AI bot, without seeing a doctor, it will be there right time to consider it.Until then, participating in AI chat bot endeavors only boosts the AI marketing engine and the AI knowledge engine.The last thing I would want to see is someone trying to "troubleshoot" or "understand" why the circuit "designed" with the help of the AI bot "doesn't work".

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 08:09:56 pm
content: The forum going private is your own decision, Dave, and no one can make this decision for you. It's pretty drastic and would probably have as much impact for you as it would for users.The best approach for now IMHO is just to identify them (which is pretty easy so far, may not be as time goes by, but one step at a time) and ban them. There still aren't enough of them that it would take too much moderation time.As to users, if you identify one, just report the posts and let moderators do the job. Do NOT reply to them, ever, even if it's for saying how much you disagree with the bot "trolling".

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 08:38:57 pm
content: Quote from: Kim Christensen on March 15, 2023, 06:59:58 pmI managed to extract a vote from it.It seems to vote, NO!To keep it open and public.It point blank refused to give a vote, so I got around that, by making it write a story about it ...QuoteQuoteQuoteQuote

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 08:48:21 pm
content: well they need to be identified and banned because its guerilla advertising for an organization (be it open or closed source) trying to get developers, publicity or possibly even money and contracts. treat it like spam. Like someone pushing the agenda to convince companies to buy it.A company that is trying to sell AI services could literally pay people to make publicity for the service so they can get contracts.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 08:50:33 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on March 15, 2023, 08:48:21 pmAbsolutely. Refer to the other thread about what the goals could be (in the lounge.)Most people seem fixated to the AI fun bandwagon and fail to see that it's all very aggressive marketing.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 08:53:12 pm
content: maybe some people are not aware about how seriously some companies take advertising, often its a priority over anything else, because they just want to effect a split second decision someone has to make some where with no real information.

author: ogden
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:17:07 pm
content: I personally do not mind to get computed answers, but I want to be *absolutely* sure which input comes from living, sentient beings and which - from artificial.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:25:57 pm
content: Quote from: ogden on March 15, 2023, 09:17:07 pmHow do you determine that a human poster here is a sentient being? That's not as easy as I would have hoped.The real danger is a human poster that believes a chatgpt answer, reword/reformulates it, and posts that response here. I feel I've been seeing such posts for many years.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:47:20 pm
content: and I think maybe, if it can help, its not much different then turning off the lights of a city to reduce attack until some progress is made. It is a situation that is ongoing... and nothing is inevitable imo, I don't want to fall into dogma of AI being inevitable, maybe its not, to the disappointment of the financial backers. Dave jones makes a fair point that it is a time sensitive defensive situation.

author: ogden
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:48:11 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on March 15, 2023, 09:25:57 pmThis is exactly my point - that security/authenticity of current internet is insufficient. I am very concerned that literally anybody can get "unfiltered" advice.

author: fourfathom
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:54:09 pm
content: Quote from: ogden on March 15, 2023, 09:48:11 pmAre you very concerned that literally anybody can get bad advice from a human posting here? It happens.What we do here is debate and explain, and digress and show off, but eventually the bad advice is replaced by good advice. The same thing is going to happen with AI-generated advice.

author: Dr. Frank
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:56:06 pm
content: I'm an absolute fan of 'Blade Runner'.If there would be a liability for an identification of AI created posts, no problem.Otherwise - 'you'll never know' - just kill them.FrankBtw.: Would a private forum prevent AI from entering, anyhow?I already have difficulties with some human users here, to distinguish real electronic experience from pure baloney, like simply replicating threads/knowledge from other users, evidently w/o any own experimental background.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 09:58:59 pm
content: I think the forum should stay visible. For example, I've found out about the EEVblog forum after Google Search popped a few very good threads from EEVblog, and after heaving the nice surprise to not be coerced to register for a click on a JPG and a 20kB download.Nobody knows yet how to deal with ChatGPT bots.Maybe add some more human-verification tests for new accounts, or do like other forums where the first 10 posts or the first 3 days (whichever comes first) will become visible only after a moderator approval. Though, this would probably need much more than 3 moderators to cover 24/7 human approval for newcomer's posts.Responsible moderators are hard to find. My advice would be to make generic Moderator1 .. ModeratorN accounts, and keep those separated from the current username, so the moderators can come and go without altering their presence as normal users. Otherwise, in time they'll get hard fillings.Most of all, tell the new mods that they areto guard against vandalism only, i.e. against chat bots, and not to establish the technical correctness of a post. If a moderator thinks it should be 2k2 and not 1k2, then use the normal username to comment about technical solutions. Mods accounts must by used for administrative tasks only.

author: ogden
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:12:50 pm
content: Quote from: fourfathom on March 15, 2023, 09:54:09 pmI am concerned that AI will help stupid to look smart.

author: julian1
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:13:12 pm
content: A question, is whether forum posts and content, should be allowed to be used as training data, to be reused by chat-gpt shells for private or public use.For search there is already a customary machine-interface protoctol - robots.txt used to determine the scope of content that can be accessed for indexing and archiving.But a prominent human-written statement outlining the terms of use to access this site and content, would likely be respected and be enforceable (even against a user/indexer not having a forum account).What are other technical forums doing in response?The organizational origin and purpose of open-AI, is a bit unclear.They formed as a charitable organization with an intent to release open-source software. But subsequently pivoted to a regular corp structure, and now develop in isolation/closed-source.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:14:00 pm
content: is anyone worried about replicators ?

author: ogden
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:22:48 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on March 15, 2023, 10:14:00 pmPlease explain replicators, in details.

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:31:07 pm
content: I think I'm going to review the Terminator movies this weekend.

author: Bicurico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 15, 2023, 10:35:47 pm
content: This is certainly Dave's attempt for an elaborate April's fool joke.I don't care for any AI learning with this forum and if there are AI replies, that's fine, too, as long as they are useful. They should be flagged as such, though, I guess.Close the forum? That doesn't make any sense. The AI would just register as a human...

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 12:18:54 am
content: Quote from: Bicurico on March 15, 2023, 10:35:47 pmI wouldn't say it was elaborate at all. But I think it was an intentional way to distract from the Dilbert et.al. threads. Which seems to have worked very well.I wonder if he asked chatGPT "how can I stop nonsense being posted in the Dilbert thread?" And chatGPT responded "Start a new thread about something else."I just can't see chatGPT being the biggest blight on this forum. But, only a singleunsureresponse in the poll says the responses are not representative at this stage. I think most are still on the fence about AI and whether or not they will be a net benefit or a real problem.Someone else post about letting a pair of chatGPT bots argue amongst themselves, which had occurred to me too. It was postulated (in jest) that they would go on for hundreds of posts but I think they will converge on the same argument and agree if they are both using the same dataset for knowledge. Still think that would be their downfall if there was a bot uprising.

author: Dr. Frank
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 12:26:23 am
content: Quote from: ogden on March 15, 2023, 10:22:48 pmReplicants... Watch 'Blade Runner '

author: Tomorokoshi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 01:10:05 am
content: Quote from: Dr. Frank on March 16, 2023, 12:26:23 amSore wa sehr interessant, dark, and mul.

author: Tomorokoshi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 01:27:52 am
content: I voted "no".On occasion, when searching for something that it didn't occur to me to search for in EEVblog, a hit comes up to EEVblog that is more detailed, relevant, and useful than any of the other hits.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 03:16:06 am
content: No, but an automatic check feature would be nice -- "this post flagged as xx% likely AI generated" or a "check this on IsPostAIGenerated.com".I suppose it'll be some months (years?) before such a service trickles down to a forum plugin (and/or is affordable enough at scale?), but, well, to say I can envision such a feature I guess.I wouldguessit needn't be burdensome on the server(s) if it's just an async request and the result gets chucked into the database (post has not been reviewed / post reviewed as x). And maybe a button to queue a recheck / increase priority, but not actually force a request since that would be easily abused. Or maybe by then, a suitable IDing model will be available that runs on the server without slowing things much.Tim

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 05:28:49 am
content: I've been a regular form user for over a decade, but I still often follow search results here. Having the form private would be a pretty big negative impact for me. The forum search is... bad to terrible, and even if it wasn't, I don't want to separately search multiple forums and stack exchange.Also, as someone who does provide answers to questions free of charge here and other places, I don't really care if AI bots ingest that and then spit it back to other people. It's not a business for me, and if a computer program can organize what I said along with others and make it more useful and accessible that's fine with me. This depends on the nature of the form -- like if this were a photography or creative writing forum where people were soliciting feedback on their craft I would 100% make it private to avoid that being ingested into GPT-N. But a forum primarily focused around providing information and knowledge doesn't seem like it should get locked up.In the other poll I am in favor of banning AI posts, just not making the foum members only.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 16, 2023, 10:01:20 am
content: Might as well lock this thread as the discussion should move to the bot banning thread.