Answer Assistant is an experiment in which AI-generated answers are verified, edited, and curated by the community before becoming publicly visible. The experiment is only active on a few participating Stack Exchange communities.
Only site moderators and logged-in users with a certain amount of rep determined by those communities will be able to see and verify “private” AI-generated answers. This limited-visibility curation process ensures that answers are verified by humans, and edited when appropriate, before they can become public to all users viewing the Stack Exchange site.
Which questions are eligible to get a private AI-generated answer?
Questions that meet the following criteria may receive an AI-generated answer:
- Older than 72 hours, to leave time for human curation and editing
- Posted in 2024 or 2025
- Net positive score (0+)
- Unanswered, defined as having no upvoted or accepted answer
This criteria may be customized per-site over the course of the experiment.
Who can see a private AI-generated answer?
Viewability of private answers is limited to users with a specific amount of reputation. The amount can vary depending on the site, based on site activity level and other factors.
What actions are possible on a private AI-generated answer?
Verify
Users who can see a private answer can review the context and verify the answer’s correctness by selecting “Correct”, “Incorrect”, or “Partially”.
This verification should be based on a user’s existing knowledge and/or their consultation with other trusted sources.
This “correctness vote” can be changed within the first five minutes after selection. If a private answer is edited, anyone who has voted is able to change their existing vote.
When a private answer accrues enough “Correct” votes, it will become public. At that point, it is presented to all users and viewers like other human answers, but is labeled differently and attributed to the Answer Bot user, and is subject to other curation and moderation processes.
When a private answer accrues enough “Incorrect” votes, it will move to a deleted state, at which point it is only visible to site moderators.
“Partially correct” votes do not influence the outcome of the community verification, but ideally can be used in conjunction with a comment.
Votes from other users are not tallied or displayed.
The specific number of votes required for the outcome can vary depending on the site, based on site activity level and other factors.
Comment
Comments will be visible to other users who have sufficient reputation to verify an AI-generated answer. Comments left while an answer is in the private state will not be displayed if the answer becomes public, so comments can be focused on the task of verifying the answer.
Comments might include:
- Notes about good or bad aspects of the answer
- Suggestions for what should be changed if the answer is edited
- Context for a correctness vote that was cast
- Information for other reviewers of the private answer
Please note: comments are not a method to query the AI further and generate an updated answer. They are meant for users working to verify the answer or for site moderators to review.
Edit
Any user with editing privileges on the site is able to make edits to a private answer. Edits can bring the answer into alignment with site guidelines, remove incorrect or unnecessary information, or add further clarity.
After an answer is edited, previous correctness votes remain valid. However, the voters will be able to change their vote if they wish, after seeing the edits.
If an answer becomes public, the edits that occurred in the private state are only visible to site moderators and users who made edits while the answer was private. This is a measure put in place to keep the initial AI-generated output from being indexed/crawled.
Example of the non-moderator view of a public Answer Bot answer's timeline
Flag
Any user able to view a private answer is able to flag the answer as needing attention from moderators, and provide further context for the flag in a free-form text field. Comments on private answers can also be flagged.
Delete (moderators only)
Moderators can move a private answer to the deleted state at any time.
FAQ
What happens when a question with a private answer gets a human answer?
Nothing changes, the private answer can still be verified and become public or deleted via the processes described.
What happens when a question with a private answer gets deleted?
The private answer moves to a deleted state as well. If the question is undeleted, the private answer remains in the deleted state.
Can a private answer be undeleted?
Not at this time.
Is anything operationally different about public AI-generated answers?
The Answer Bot user cannot earn reputation, but otherwise the public answers operate the same as human-authored answers. The public edit history begins at the time the answer became public, with a link to the private answer history available to site moderators and any user who made an edit while the answer was in the private state.
What happens if a question with an AI-generated answer is migrated to another site?
The AI-generated answer will not be migrated, even if it has become public on the originating site.
Are the reputation requirements, rewards and costs different for public answers from Answer Bot?
Accepting an Answer Bot answer does not give +2 to the question author. There is no difference in reputation requirements for voting on the answers. Downvoting an Answer Bot answer deducts 1 reputation from the voter, as on human-authored answers.