If anyone wants an answer from some GenAI, they'll ask a GenAI. This service is already available all over the place, by approximately 999 other companies.

First of all, many people come to SE explicitly because they want an answer from a human expert and not from an AI.

As one version of that, SE has in latter years turned into the place where people come after they already tried to ask an AI but only got nonsense as an answer. It has become common that people write things in their questions like "I tried to ask ChatGPT but it didn't work".

And the reason that didn't work is that GenAI is rather useless for moderately advanced questions and topics, for example about programming. It cannot be trusted because it is simply too bad. The state of GenAI is not what you think it is.

You get back garbage, lies and hallucinations mixed in with portions of correct information - aka the best kind of lies. Such a messy AI reply often can't be salvaged by editing because what's written simply doesn't make sense. Why edit things that hold no value?

Furthermore, the GenAI often blatantly contradicts itself in many places, so even when editing there's a chance of some of that madness slipping through. Ask it a somewhat advanced question and you might find statements in the answer along "A equals B.... B does not equal C... A equals C." The GenAI isn't even capable of proof-reading such basic things, because it just generates text, which doesn't necessarily connect with previously written text in the same answer. This happens more often than not - what the AI is lacking specifically is intelligence.

The subjective sales argument made by many is something like: there are a few lost souls out there who have never heard of GenAI but will get pleasantly surprised when a low quality answer is provided from one at SE. Do you remember that moment when you want to ask tech support why your Internet isn't working and you got pleasantly surprised that you get to talk to a chat bot instead of a human? No? Me neither.

From there, common sense leaves us with the following conclusions for this new feature:

• Potential target audience: nobody.
• Purpose of salvaging AI replies: pointless busy-work and likely more work that just writing a completely new answer.

We can't have intelligence, artificial or otherwise, if we don't even apply basic human common sense during project idea evaluation.

If anyone wants an answer from some GenAI, they'll ask a GenAI. This service is already available all over the web, by approximately 999 other companies.

First of all, many people come to SE explicitly because they want an answer from a human expert and not from an AI.

As one version of that, SE has in latter years turned into the place where people come after they already tried to ask an AI but only got nonsense as an answer. It has become common that people write things in their questions like "I tried to ask ChatGPT but it didn't work".

And the reason that didn't work is that GenAI is rather useless for moderately advanced questions and topics, for example about programming. It cannot be trusted because it is simply too bad. The state of GenAI is not what you think it is.

You get back garbage, lies and hallucinations mixed in with portions of correct information - aka the best kind of lies. Such a messy AI reply often can't be salvaged by editing because what's written simply doesn't make sense. Why edit things that hold no value?

Furthermore, the GenAI often blatantly contradicts itself in many places, so even when editing there's a chance of some of that madness slipping through. Ask it a somewhat advanced question and you might find statements in the answer along "A equals B.... B does not equal C... A equals C." The GenAI isn't even capable of proof-reading such basic things, because it just generates text, which doesn't necessarily connect with previously written text in the same answer. This happens more often than not - what the AI is lacking specifically is intelligence.

The subjective sales argument made by many is something like: there are a few lost souls out there who have never heard of GenAI but will get pleasantly surprised when a low quality answer is provided from one at SE. Do you remember that moment when you want to ask tech support why your Internet isn't working and you got pleasantly surprised that you get to talk to a chat bot instead of a human? No? Me neither.

From there, common sense leaves us with the following conclusions for this new feature:

• Potential target audience: nobody.
• Purpose of salvaging AI replies: pointless busy-work and likely more work that just writing a completely new answer.

We can't have intelligence, artificial or otherwise, if we don't even apply basic human common sense during project idea evaluation.