IEEE TEMS: "Generative AI Degrades Online Communities" (DigHum-Series)

#digital #humanism #dighum #AI #LLM #ChatGPT #privacy #machine #learning #socialmedia

We are pleased to invite you to our next talk in our Lecture Series:

Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Summer Time (UTC+2)

Topic: “Generative AI Degrades Online Communities”
(scroll down for abstract and CV)

Speaker: Gordon Burtch (Questrom School of Business, Boston University, USA)
Moderator: Enrico Nardelli (University of Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy)

To participate in the talks via Zoom go to: https://tuwien.zoom.us/j/96389928143?pwd=UU5YRkNuRmdoWHV4MFBwMWRCcUErdz09
(Password: 0dzqxqiy)

The talk will be live streamed and recorded on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/digitalhumanism

For further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series, see https://dighum.org/#latest-news. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

In case you missed the last lecture you can watch the recording of “Civic Virtue and Digital Technology” by Wessel Reijers.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Hannes Werthner
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ABSTRACT “Generative AI Degrades Online Communities”:

Generative artificial Intelligence technologies, especially large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, are revolutionizing information acquisition and content production across a variety of domains. These technologies have a significant potential to impact participation and content production in online knowledge communities. We provide initial evidence of this, analyzing data from Stack Overflow and Reddit developer communities between October 2021 and March 2023, documenting ChatGPT’s influence on user activity in the former. We observe significant declines in both website visits and question volumes at Stack Overflow, particularly around topics where ChatGPT excels. By contrast, activity in Reddit communities shows no evidence of decline, suggesting the importance of social fabric as a buffer against the community-degrading effects of LLMs. Finally, the decline in participation on Stack Overflow is found to be concentrated among newer users, indicating that more junior, less socially embedded users are particularly likely to exit.

Short Bio of Gordon Burtch:

Gordon Burtch is a Professor of Information Systems and Fellow of the Digital Business Institute at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. His research, which focuses on the economic evaluation of information systems, employs empirical analyses rooted in econometrics and field experimentation to identify and quantify the drivers of individual participation in online social contexts. His work has been published in various leading journals, including Management Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. More https://gburtch.github.io/