TL;DR: I propose limiting the ability to post answers in quick succession to address the problem because the problem is not individual answers generated by AI but users posting many auto-generated answers in a short period of time in order to trying to farm reputation.
The effort to create answers via AI that look correct at a first glance but are in many cases incorrect or incomplete is very low (just a few seconds).
The effort for the person that asked the original question to read, understand and test out the answer to find out whether the answer actually answers the question is much higher (minutes).
In the same way, the effort for other people reading the question and answers to the question to identify whether the answer is correct and valid is much higher (minutes).
So, a person can generate a lot of answers using AI in a very short time while other persons need to invest a lot of time to verify the correctness of the answers in order to be able to up- or downvote them.
I propose to address the issue by putting stricter limits on how many answers users are allowed to post in a short time.
The current limits are:
Answering
- Users with < 125 rep must wait 3 minutes between answers
- Users with between 125 and 10k rep trip CAPTCHA* if more than once per 60 seconds, or within 5 seconds of starting new post
- Users with ≥ 10k rep trip CAPTCHA* if more than once per 30 seconds, or within 5 seconds of starting new post
- Users of any reputation level can only answer the same question once every 60 seconds
I propose to increase the time to wait before being allowed to post another answer to at least 1 hour for low-reputation users. Or limit the number of answers allowed to maybe 2 per day for low-reputation users. A new limit (waiting time between answers or max number of answers per day) should be introduced for users with medium reputation.
Writing good answers takes time:
- Read the question, understand the question
- Maybe read and understand other answers already present
- Read documentation, reproduce issue locally
- Check for duplicates
- Try out solution locally
- Write down and explain solution
To allow users to create a new answer every three minutes (or even faster for medium or high-reputation users) is not necessary but counter-productive when we want to encourage good answers.
