sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

Stack overflow had taken the stance to ban all AI-generated content. It didn't matter it was spam or the perfect answer, if it was AI-generated, that was enough for removal.

I guess the company is owned by someone with significant stake in AI and didn't want the example of a big community banning AI, just like most company would prefer to kill their business than allow an union.

the letter states it pretty clearly

because StackOverflow incentivizes people to answer questions and rewards them with points for doing so, there was an epidemic of people trying to farm points by copy-pasting questions into AI services like ChatGPT and pasting the answers back into StackOverflow

It's a cheap and easy way to produce answers that look good at a glance and aren't obviously spam, so people are doing it in massive amounts. Even though the answers are often flawed on closer examination, the flaws are hidden well enough that it takes actual human effort to check them.

A lot of user-generated content sites are getting hit by this right now. The combination of "massive increase in submission rates" and "much of the content has major flaws that require real scrutiny to discover" is completely overwhelming sites that prioritize content quality over quantity. It's a huge increase in workload, since there's a lot more content that needs screening, and the screening can't be deferred because a higher-than-usual portion of the content is utter crap that can't be allowed to stay up for too long. That's especially bad for sites like StackOverflow who depend on unpaid human volunteers contributing their time and expertise to help screen answers.