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I would like to know how much the advent of AI tools like chatGpt and many other affected the usage of Stack Overflow. Before it was a holy place for developers. How much did AI affect the traffic in Stack Overflow?

In certain future, do you see Stack Overflow getting completely switch-off as AI models keep upgrading?

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    AI is trained on SO, for that, many people say the quality of AI is comparable. If SO goes out, the AI becomes outdated and there is no new source. Commented Nov 17 at 23:23
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    Although I use AI nearly every single day now as a software engineer with 28+ years of experience that doesn't really change my usage of StackOverflow much. Commented Nov 17 at 23:53
  • AI generated content is not allowed on Stack Overflow. So the impact of AI tools like ChatGPT on the community is fairly small, other than the impact on moderation, in order to delete the content that is not allowed. Commented Nov 18 at 2:46
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    The rate at which new questions are asked has dropped by more than a factor of 10 and keeps decreasing: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/434504/7483211 Traffic has likely decreased similarly, though it's harder to know without access to private data. Traffic will keep decreasing as older content becomes outdated. I'm pretty sure the bulk of the decrease is due to ChatGPT & co. Commented Nov 18 at 7:08
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    @CorneliusRoemer then why did the decrease start before the release of widely available GenAI tools? You seem to be misinterpreting the data. Commented Nov 18 at 7:35
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    related on MSE: meta.stackexchange.com/q/384355/997587 meta.stackexchange.com/q/386983/997587. also, ... why is this closed as not seeking discussion? Commented Nov 18 at 7:59
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    @starball When I saw this thread a short while ago I assumed there were a bunch of deleted comments with an "unproductive" conversation. Apparently not :p Voting to reopen. Commented Nov 18 at 8:14
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    @cafce25 it started earlier because Stack Overflow had a PR problem long before pseudo-AI came along. But when pseudo-AI did come along, people had the ammunition they needed to actually turn dislike into hate and avoid the platform altogether. It's cause and effect. Commented Nov 18 at 8:44
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    I think this question is too general and cannot be answered reasonably within the bounds here. LLM services surely have affected everything and the future is unclear. You will likely only hear opinions (positive or negative) about them. Maybe you want to know something more specific? For example only about the traffic or only about specific usage patterns? Commented Nov 18 at 16:22

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The rate at which new questions are asked has dropped by more than a factor of 10 and keeps decreasing: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/434504/7483211 Traffic has likely decreased similarly, though it's harder to know without access to private data. Traffic will keep decreasing as older content becomes outdated. I'm pretty sure the bulk of the decrease is due to ChatGPT & co.

– Cornelius Roemer (ref)

While some people disagree that AI tools were the main cause of this decline, they certainly had a part in this.

What I imagine happened:

  • Users who wanted to ask easy questions started asking AI tools instead of Stack Overflow. AI can answer easy questions easily and often correctly. So there is no need to ask these questions on Stack Overflow anymore.
  • Users who were too lazy to pose their question started using AI instead. It's much easier to clarify your question when using an AI tool than Stack Overflow — you just make a chat instead of posting comments.
  • Users who were too lazy to search or unable to judge the relevance of search results started using AI tools. Search was always bad/broken on Stack Overflow, so AI tools surpassed its efficiency easily.

So we have much fewer "bad" questions now. A "healthy" process of replacing human labour by robots. If a robot can answer a question, humans shouldn't waste time even reading it.

What about answers? I don't have the statistics. I hope it has improved, but I have no reason to believe that.

Regarding the future: we still have the "problem" of quality of AI's answers. If your question is moderately hard, if it contains something new which AI has never trained on, if it's interesting — it should be asked on Stack Overflow. Or some other site which will replace Stack Overflow. I see only two ways for Stack Overflow to become useless:

  1. Software development becomes an insignificant part of human culture. Do we have a Stack-Overflow-like site for hide-and-seek strategies? No. If software development becomes as insignificant as that, there you go.
  2. AI will solve all humanity's problems. This is an apocalyptic scenario which can happen, and all bets are off.
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    So existing contributions were to difficult to find and categorize, leading to questions being asked more than once at various levels of quality, and only in rare instances could the existing answers be linked to the new questions. Add the low quality garbage that cannot be answered without a crystal ball, and AI generated nonsense, and you have the perfect storm for reducing participation of actual developers who can answer questions (like myself) Commented Nov 18 at 11:07
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    If AI ends up solving all of humanity's problems, that's a good thing, isn't it? It would only be apocalyptic if it made the problems worse, or introduced new problems. Commented Nov 18 at 11:50
  • @cigien One might solve all the problems in code by erasing it (sure, loosing some features). Or it's just easier to solve all the problems by rewriting the code from scratch. Don't replace 'code' with 'humanity'. Commented 2 days ago
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    3. SO itself decides to invite low-quality questions with low-quality answers and no means of community moderation. In turn, this site will eventually become a landfill of software trivia. At this point, it will be impossible for AI to tell gems from garbage and the site becomes useless as a training resource - but this couldn't possibly happen, right? Commented 2 days ago

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