In short: moderators do not remove answers based on (their perception of) technical merit, non-moderators cannot remove answers as long as the score is non-negative, and GPT drivel sounds convincing enough to get upvotes from credulous newbies, so the answers have positive score.
So fix the first one. Provide a process for removing answers that are demonstrably false. Convincing-sounding drivel that gets upvotes isn't a new problem on SO, it's just amplified by the new tech.
But this is a problem of scale. If I wrote a bot that posted 10k AI generated questions and answers per hour, you would surely agree that it would be unreasonable to require every answer to be human-reviewed before it can be removed - it would be an incredible waste of time and effort. (Also note that filling SO with LLM-generated content is entirely pointless - someone who wants LLM-generated answers can just go ask an LLM).
Now spread that one bot over hundreds of users and you have the same end result. That's why the communities of different SE sites all ended up with a similar policy.
I get that, but the problem of scale is one that you have no matter what. Either you have to detect and filter out AI posts at scale, or you have to detect and filter out bad content at scale.
I'm not suggesting either problem is easy, but taking the "ban AI" approach is harmful for several reasons. Detecting AI without false positives is extremely hard and puts too much decision-making power in the gut reactions of moderators. Additionally, banning it has the negative side effect of making the tool unavailable to people who might legitimately benefit from it when producing good content, such as ESL speakers using it to polish their English.
We need to moderate based on the effect of the user's content on the community, not the technology used to produce the content. If you're dealing with a bot posting 10k questions and answers per hour, it wouldn't matter if that bot were using GPT or just re-posting content scraped from the web—the abuse isn't in the use of AI, it's in the spam. So make a rule against spam and auto-ban people who do it.
I said this elsewhere in the thread too, but the ban was always meant to be temporary: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... The moderators recognize it's inevitable and wanted to find a way to helpfully integrate AI. The strike is not about making the ban permanent; it's about being suddenly overruled in secret, cutting off the possibility for dialogue to find a good solution.
