Can Moderators and curators be easily replaced by AI? Is there some sort of backup plan if the cooperation decides to do this?

@C.S.Cameron "Easily" no

Backup plan, quit :D

Could a bunch of Prompt Engineers working for free make it happen?

rofl

No

Could you write a specialised tool that can use AI to do it? Sure, for lots of money and time

@C.S.Cameron Perhaps I am already an AI construct? :)

@andrew.46-OnStrike I thought everyone in here was 40-line shell scripts.

@andrew.46-OnStrike I was thinking the same thing. Who owns the names used on AU? What if they expelled you and then replaced you with AI? Who would ever know? Can you prove you are andrew.46? Can I prove I am C.S.Cameron? Can vidarlo prove he is vidarlo? Spooky.

@C.S.Cameron On the internet no one knows you're a dog or an AI

@C.S.Cameron I have often wondered if the Company would ever go 'hard core' and replace all of the striking Mods and then impose whatever hair-brained AI scheme they wanted. You would think 'surely not!' but these are unusual times... My life would not change that much but a small light would have gone out :(

@JourneymanGeekOnStrike Is that not what the corporation is saying? That suspending users based on suspicion, intuition, and unproven testing software might not be fair.

We're not solely based on that

And don't forget, we asked the company for guidence, got none, then had the rules changed with no real warning

@C.S.Cameron While they can't even detect spam —even at the spammiest, most obviious spam like we've been getting recently— it seems unlikely. Maybe that'd be a good start. But the current most frustrating parts of this system are things that are locked away in black boxes. I can't set who gets the question/answer ban (for prolonged poor quality) and I can't override it when the system does.

I do actually think AI has an important role here. Teasing enough information out of a hardware debugging problem is tedious and poorly handled by /ask. An AI coaching out and formatting the right data would save people a fair bit of time. Tag/title suggestions too. And quality detection and spam removal. As much as that is taking things away from people donating their time, these are things that don't actually help people get things fixed. They're distractions that I'm happy for AI to take on.

Agreed, there are some perfectly valid and useful potential applications of AI or even LLM on SE, but the idea of allowing AI answers with all their mistakes and limitations is... not a good one.

not to mention the fact that the company has broken its written promises, completely destroying trust, and has for the first time ever presumed to dictate quality criteria for the communities, making the "these are community run sites" claim a lie.

@terdononstrike (or any other moderator): I just received three very similar answers to an obviously obsolete question of mine. See here: askubuntu.com/a/1474116 All are from new users. I've seen a similar thing on Mathematica.StackExchange. New users post superficially helpful, but trivial answers, then a couple of days later replace the text with spam. Not saying that this will happen here, but it's suspicious.

@Szabolcs I'm afraid I can't help since I'm not a mod here (all moderators from any site in the Stack Exchange networks are also chat moderators, which is why I look like a mod), although I used to be.

Two of those answers really smell like AI to me, rather than spam seeds, but we'll see.

Yeah, they're both AI. Sadly, the company has forbidden us from doing anything about it.

@terdononstrike Which is why the AU mods are on strike for the most part.

@Szabolcs With the mods on strike, and SE forbidding us from doing anything about AI answers as spam, etc., we're not able to do anything about it. Even if we weren't on strike, SE has forbidden us to do anything (a "hands tied" scenario). So we can't do anything about it.