Generative artificial intelligence (a.k.a. GPT, LLM, generative AI, genAI) tools may not be used to generate content for Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange. The content you provide must either be your own original work, or your summary of the properly referenced work of others. If your content is determined to have been written by generative artificial intelligence tools, it will likely be deleted, along with any reputation earned from it. Posting content generated by generative artificial intelligence tools may lead to a warning from moderators, or possibly a suspension for repeated infractions.
What counts as “content generated by generative artificial intelligence tools”?
“Content generated by generative artificial intelligence tools” is any content crafted, in part or in whole, using a tool that writes a response automatically based on a prompt it is provided. These tools include large language models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Because these tools are trained to answer with language that matches authentic text, the responses may look and sound plausible, but the quality of generated answers can vary significantly (up to, and including, completely wrong answers).
Please do not draft content for Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange using large language model (LLM) services as described above.
Why am I not allowed to use generative artificial intelligence services to draft my content?
Stack Exchange is a collaborative resource, developed and maintained by members of the community. There are a few primary issues with content generated by large language models that makes it unsuitable for use on Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange:
- Users who ask questions on Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange expect to receive an answer authored and vetted by a human. This ensures that the answer is factual, relevant, and complete, up to the standards of another human. While human authors are not perfect, generative artificial intelligence tools may not take into account other important factors to a question (e.g., optimization, security, etc.), often add excessive noise to their answers (e.g., explaining all details, no matter how relevant), and may fabricate false or misleading information.
- Users who ask questions on Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange may have already sought answers elsewhere. Due to the ease of using generative artificial intelligence services, if a user wanted an answer from an artificial intelligence, they may already have sought one, and so it does not make sense to provide one here.
- Generative artificial intelligence tools are not capable of citing the sources of knowledge used up to the standards of the Stack Exchange network. Even when generative artificial intelligence tools appear to cite sources for responses, such sources may not be relevant to the original request, or may not exist at all. For Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange, this means the content may not honestly or fairly represent the sources of knowledge used, even if someone explicitly cites the generative artificial intelligence tool as an author in their content.
Are there alternatives to using generative artificial intelligence services?
Many of the answers on Gardening & Landscaping Stack Exchange are created by users sharing their own expertise. In particular, when supplying answers outside their expertise, users should reference trustworthy sources. Searching for sources, synthesizing them into a good answer, and referencing them clearly are critical steps in developing a well-crafted answer.
Remember - the person who asked a question needs a correct answer. As such, answering correctly is always more important than answering quickly. Additionally, our system thrives on questions getting multiple good answers, which are more likely to help future visitors who have the same question. By following a process that creates consistently correct answers of good quality, and that are well-referenced as needed, you should do just fine here.