Reddit’s Answers feature uses generative AI to let users ask questions and receive concise, curated summaries of relevant discussions and posts from across Reddit.
The tool synthesizes real user content into easy-to-understand answers, including links to the original conversations and related communities for deeper exploration.
The aim is to improve search by making it faster and smarter, helping users find human perspectives, recommendations, and information within Reddit’s vast network of communities.
Points for Discussion:
- Would an AI-powered Answers feature enhance Lemmy’s user experience, or would it detract from the platform’s focus on decentralized, community-driven discussion?
- How might such a feature impact content discovery and engagement on Lemmy?
- What concerns might arise regarding privacy, moderation, or the risk of AI-generated misinformation?
- Should Lemmy prioritize transparency and open-source AI solutions if it were to implement a similar feature?
- How could Lemmy’s federated structure influence the effectiveness or challenges of such a tool compared to Reddit’s centralized approach?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on whether Lemmy should explore an AI-powered Answers feature and what considerations would be most important for our community!
Reddit Answers (Currently in Beta)
For all your questions, introducing Reddit Answers
We got early access to Reddit Answers. It was about as accurate as the average Redditor.
I’m inclined to say no. It pretty much a useless feature and doesn’t solve the fundamental problems of searching a federated service like Lemmy.
Even if LLMs worked like the general public thinks they should, who would pay for the processing time? A one off request isn’t too expensive, sure, but multiply that times however many users a server might have and it gets real expensive real quick. And that’s just assuming the models are hosted by the Lemmy server. It gets even more expensive if you’re using a one of the public APIs to run the LLM queries.