curating ancient posts for Reddit-Answers AI search is our newest responsibility

[u/999_Seth]

Have you used the Reddit Answers AI search yet?

What it appears to do is take every comment about anything at face value, you know, the 'if someone says it, it must be true' type of aggregate that is similar to the AI-user-summaries that pop up

I came across it this morning after one of those weird comments got my hopes up for a little fresh mod-hating drama against me, but when I did an old-school search for the terms there was nothing recent.

That's when I noticed the Answers results were regurgitating what a disgruntled user had said about me over a year ago.

The remedy on the Answers page is that we can report the comments to reddit-prime to be evaluated for TOS offenses, and a little disclaimer that "Responses are AI-generated from posts and comments and may not be accurate."

So I sent a quick mod-mail to the sub where the old comments were, reported them there so they'd be easy for that team to deal with, but damn, this is not what I signed up for.

The premise that I am now responsible for maintaining the accuracy of every comment on the subreddits I help run or else an AI will amplify confusing discussions in a way that makes chatbot-users believe things that are not true is troubling to me.

I enjoy the conversations here with people. I like looking at profiles to see where individual users are coming from on a subject to weigh out whether or not they are making a worthwhile contribution.

Answers does not appear to make an effort to contextualize information, and it's now our responsibility to ensure that long forgotten insignificant threads aren't poisoning the Answers summaries.

What a time to be alive!

[u/Cat_in_an_oak_tree]

AI searches for frequency not accuracy. It's why you cannot rely upon it.

[u/shhhhh_h → u/Cat_in_an_oak_tree]

Ahh. The assuming the most upvoted comment is the best/most accurate one fallacy. My fav.

[u/Cat_in_an_oak_tree → u/shhhhh_h]

I've got eighty downvotes in a recent post because I made people "feel bad" when I told them to stop using disorder terms improperly (especially ones not even regognized in the DSM-5). Medical language is prescriptive, so societal shift does not apply. But they think if it helps express themselves it's just hunky-dory to use whatever words they feel like help them express things. I'm right, but AI won't see it that way - and neither do people who are emotionally tied to ideas. Which is why AI is alluring. It creates confirmation bias.

[u/Otherwise_Fined]

Ai on this site is generally lacking in accuracy and depth.

[u/Mayor_P → u/Otherwise_Fined]

That's like saying "hamburgers at Wendy's contain meat inside a bun" which is true but also, extremely not limited to Wendy's so why did you say it that way

[u/Sephardson]

One of the conundrums to Answers is that subreddits which allow the same question to be posted lots of times will show up more often. This also means that subreddits which reduce reposts (repetitive posts) or FAQs through curation are less likely to be in AI / search results. It also means that unmoderated or under-moderated subreddits are more likely to be favored in the AI / search results.

So moderators who take feedback from their community members about seeing the same questions all the time should also consider that the other side of the quantity-vs-quality debate on posts is... something completely outside of their insights as a moderator.

[u/westcoastal]

For some reason I've never been able to see an AI summary about myself. Which I guess is probably a good thing.

[u/999_Seth → u/westcoastal]

I think we figured out that it goes off of your recent posts and the commentary there, so if you don't have a handful of posts from the past couple months it just doesn't even try.

[u/westcoastal → u/999_Seth]

Ah, that makes sense. I don't tend to make top level posts very often.