Re: Planet Postgres and the curse of AI

st 17. 7. 2024 v 19:22 odesílatel Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids(at)gmail(dot)com>
napsal:

> I've been noticing a growing trend of blog posts written mostly, if not
> entirely, with AI (aka LLMs, ChatGPT, etc.). I'm not sure where to raise
> this issue. I considered a blog post, but this mailing list seemed a better
> forum to generate a discussion.
>
> The problem is two-fold as I see it.
>
> First, there is the issue of people trying to game the system by churning
> out content that is not theirs, but was written by a LLM. I'm not going to
> name specific posts, but after a while it gets easy to recognize things
> that are written mostly by AI.
>
> These blog posts are usually generic, describing some part of Postgres
> in an impersonal, mid-level way. Most of the time the facts are not
> wrong, per se, but they lack nuances that a real DBA would bring to the
> discussion, and often leave important things out. Code examples are often
> wrong in subtle ways. Places where you might expect a deeper discussion are
> glossed over.
>
> So this first problem is that it is polluting the Postgres blogs with
> overly bland, moderately helpful posts that are not written by a human, and
> do not really bring anything interesting to the table. There is a place for
> posts that describe basic Postgres features, but the ones written by humans
> are much better. (yeah, yeah, "for now" and all hail our AI overlords in
> the future).
>
> The second problem is worse, in that LLMs are not merely gathering
> information, but have the ability to synthesize new conclusions and facts.
> In short, they can lie. Or hallucinate. However you want to call it, it's a
> side effect of the way LLMs work. In a technical field like Postgres, this
> can be a very bad thing. I don't know how widespread this is, but I was
> tipped off about this over a year ago when I came across a blog suggesting
> using the "max_toast_size configuration parameter". For those not
> familiar, I can assure you that Postgres does not have, nor will likely
> ever have, a GUC with that name.
>
> As anyone who has spoken with ChatGPT knows, getting small important
> details correct is not its forte. I love ChatGPT and actually use it daily.
> It is amazing at doing certain tasks. But writing blog posts should not be
> one of them.
>
> Do we need a policy or a guideline for Planet Postgres? I don't know. It
> can be a gray line. Obviously spelling and grammar checking is quite
> okay, and making up random GUCs is not, but the middle bit is very hazy.
> (Human) thoughts welcome.
>

It is very unpleasant to read a long article, and at the end to understand
so there is zero valuable information. Terrible situation was on planet
mariadb https://mariadb.org/planet/, but now it was cleaned. I am for some
form of moderating - and gently touching an author that writes articles
without extra value against documentation.

Regards

Pavel

>
> Cheers,
> Greg
>
>