16
$\begingroup$

Right now the site is being flooded with posts from new users, with pseudonymous names, who use a mixture of obvious AI-generated nonsense mathematics and weird sentences (sometimes borderline offensive?) about things that have nothing at all to do with math (which are I would guess actually written by humans and not AI).

Why is this happening right now? Are the moderators aware of the situation? What is being done to address it?

If this continues, the site will become increasingly non-functional.

EDIT: I am sorry to bump this meta question, but the site continues to be flooded with AI-generated nonsense answers. The stuff that is obviously trolling has died down a bit based on my subjective impressions. But there are a ton of AI (non-)answers posted every day, especially to the more "computational" questions. Although I have no direct evidence, I am worried that people might be trying to train AI based on interacting with MO. If that happened at scale, it would really make the site awful. Any more thoughts about what can be done to combat this?

$\endgroup$
16
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ In one multi-named user's case, so that we will eventually recognise the importance of primes $p \ge 5 \mod 6$, whatever that means. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Jun 10 at 13:39
  • 10
    $\begingroup$ When this content is flagged, and people are doing so, it ends up in all the moderators' special mod inbox. So we are definitely aware of it! The 'why exactly now?' is a hard one. Who knows? All the LLMs going online makes it easier for people to use them to try their hand, for reasons best known to themselves. As for what is being done, we are doing what we have always done with accounts that are made just to post stuff that's not wanted :-) But as Scott mentioned: flag flag flag. Flagging such content as spam triggers automated tools to do their work. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 11 at 9:22
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @DavidRoberts At the risk of derailing: is there a queue where one can see "all new answers"? I tend to rely on checking the front page but this only shows questions with recent activity, and some of this is editing $\endgroup$
    – Yemon Choi
    Commented Jun 11 at 21:16
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ @YemonChoi mathoverflow.net/questions?tab=Newest works, I think. You have to go through the 'questions' link in the menu on the left (under the hamburger lines, for me) and then you can pick 'newest', 'active', 'unanswered', or even a custom filter for instance for just the newest with the tags you care about. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 13 at 4:35
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @DavidRoberts AFAIK tab shows new questions and not new answers. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jun 16 at 5:38
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @YemonChoi It is not in the same nice form as the various tabs available on the questions page, but one can search for answers and then choose to order the search result by newest or active. Sometimes it could be reasonable to restrict this to the list of tags you're watching. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jun 16 at 5:41
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Getting a list of new answers to old questions would probably be a task for SEDE. Search on the site allows to restrict by the age of the post, but the active tab shows the questions which were bumped for any reason. Feel free to ping me in my chatroom if you want to discuss this a bit more (so that we avoid a long exchange in comments). And maybe something like this would be a reasonable as a separate question here on meta. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jun 16 at 5:42
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak oh, whoops. Wasn't paying enough attention to the question. I guess the 'active' tab is the next best approximation, before actual SEDE queries like you suggest. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 9:21
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @YemonChoi sorry, it seems I completely mis-read your question! See Martin's comments $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 16 at 9:22
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ I was wondering why David's suggestion wasn't yielding what I was looking for. @MartinSleziak - thank you for the offer, I am a bit too busy to engage properly right now, but I may get in touch with you at a later date. $\endgroup$
    – Yemon Choi
    Commented Jun 16 at 20:39
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @YemonChoi: there is a first answers review queue. Given that a lot of these are using disposable accounts and just post once or twice, this may be a good way to find the problematic accounts. $\endgroup$
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Jun 19 at 7:16
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Gosh, it is getting worse, isn't it. Flag this stuff as fast as you can. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jul 2 at 1:54
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ BTW I consider this to be a reasonable question for meta. (I thought this was worth mentioning, as the question has a close vote at the moment and from the timeline I see that it was in the close votes review queue before.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 2 at 14:53
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ In context of this, would it be reasonable to discuss requiring registration: Should MathOverflow require registration to ask a question? Although the previous discussion shows this suggestions was not popular among the MO users. (And I have to admit that I have some doubts to which extent it would actually help.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 4 at 7:06
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Or possibly at least some restrictions here on meta could be considered: Change reputation required to post on meta back to 5 reputation points and To which extent should spam posts on meta be considered a problem? (I am aware that the problem is mainly on meta. But, for example, at this moment, one can see four 1-rep users on the top of the active tab on meta.) $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 4 at 7:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
36
$\begingroup$

Once in a while, people decide to post strange things here. I would recommend not giving them the pleasure of a response. The best thing to do is flag and ignore.

$\endgroup$
6
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ I don't think this answers any of the questions: why now, are mods aware, what is being done? $\endgroup$
    – Ben McKay
    Commented Jun 11 at 18:39
  • 10
    $\begingroup$ @BenMcKay Yes we are aware. We are cleaning up as it comes to our attention, and this includes things that increase the friction to continue posting such questions/answers from someone who does so. How else would you propose we deal with it? $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 12 at 1:31
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @DavidRoberts: You can probably do more. For example, you can ban users who post obvious garbage, and also ban users who support the garbage (e.g. upvoting). Why is this important? If garbage has no upvotes, it is more easily cleaned up. The upvoters of garbage are almost always garbage generators themselves. $\endgroup$
    – user21820
    Commented Jun 14 at 11:55
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ @user21820 I'm not sure how much I'm at liberty to say about what we can do regarding accounts that only post rubbish ;-) rest assured it's not a "tsk-tsk". When I say 'friction', I mean a lot. Also votes are anonymous to us, nothing we can do there. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Jun 14 at 15:22
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @DavidRoberts: Ah ok thanks! $\endgroup$
    – user21820
    Commented Jun 15 at 4:09
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @BenMcKay I believe I answered the first question fairly comprehensively. I apologize for not writing a more complete or reassuring answer to the remaining questions. $\endgroup$
    – S. Carnahan Mod
    Commented Jun 15 at 7:11

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .