Quora “was once a vibrant community dedicated to answering our most specific questions,” Slate writes. “But users are fleeing,” while the site is “a never-ending cesspool of pointless, repetitive sludge filled with bizarre, nonsensical, and straight-up hateful, AI-generated entries.” There is an avalanche of…” The site has been plagued by moderation issues, spam, trolls and bots reposting questions from Reddit (as well as sites like Facebook and Google, which have forced cuts to Quora’s support and moderation teams). competition for advertising revenue from). But automating moderation “didn’t improve the situation… Quora now also offers AI-generated images to accompany users’ answers, even though the generated illustrations have little meaning.” What's more, since Quora started using AI, it “generates machine answers for a large number of selected question pages,” meaning the site uses human-generated answers to train the AI. revealed the potential for use in This means that the detailed descriptions that Quoran provides almost free of charge are fed into custom large-scale language models. Last summer, updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy went into effect on the site. Angel investor and Quoran colleague David S. Rose paraphrases these sentiments: “You grant all other Quora users the unrestricted right to reuse and adapt your answers.'' “You grant all other Quora users the unrestricted right to reuse and adapt your answers.'' “You grant all other Quora users the unrestricted right to use your answers for LLM training unless you specifically opt out.'' and “You completely waive your right to participate in any class action lawsuit brought against Quora.” (Quora's Help Center states, “Currently, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train the LLM used to generate content on Quora. However, this may change in the future.'' However, it acknowledges that “opt-out does not cover everything.'') This allows Quorans to agree to the new terms. They had to decide whether to take the job or run away, which raised issues of consent and ownership. High-profile users like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey have removed their work from their profiles and written notes explaining why. “AI issues, terms of service issues are causing a huge exodus of top talent from Quora. It's based on how many people say, 'I downloaded mine and quit.'” Lucky he told me. Not all Quorans want to leave, but the choice to stay on a website that constantly has to contend with errors, spam, vandalism, and even account impersonation is difficult for them. The tragedy of Quora is not just that it has destroyed what was once a thriving community. It assumed that with all of its goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity, it could automate a comparable system, without giving too much thought to how pale the comparison obviously is. It was. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] makes grim predictions about the future. “Eventually, Quora will be all about robot questions and robot answers.” If someone bothered to ask why Quora died, how would the site answer it? Is it? The article states that Andreessen Horowitz “made a much-needed $75 million investment in Quora, but only for the development of Poe, an on-site generative text chatbot.”
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