Stan doesn't know about Badger and the penguin!
Badger and the penguin is a very old thread and topic. I've only trained him on the last 3 years so far. Most of his knowledge is based on our editorial content. If you want to find out about forum content then the AI contextual search under the 'Talk to Stan' tab is the best way to go, until we've got the chatbot Stan trained on more forum stuff.
Someone asked why we have spent time and money on this AI chatbot. The principal reason is to free our small team up from answering lots of queries so they can spend more time on other work from content creation to marketing. In terms of costs, I did most of Stan's trainig while I was on holiday. The direct costs are pretty small - a single query costs a fraction of 1p eg. £0.0008. Obviously 'learning' over 10 million forum posts would be pretty costly even at that level per query, so I've been prioritising content starting iwth the knowledge Stan needs to be able to answer the most common subscription questions we get.
He's learning as we go to, so all new stories get get mixed in the pot. For the forum we are working on a system that will convert entire topics into a single learning point rather than have Stan 'read' every reply seperately. That will take that 10 million figure down to a more practical and affordable level of complete topics. That's taking some data manipulation and coding time.
But it's alos not just a tool to free up time for us. It's useful for you guys too. I've seen one query asking Stan for help with setting up a Fox 36 fork, including an explanation of terms like spring rates and other jargon. I thought his response was very good.
Well, yesterday I asked it about making a Fox 36 less progressive... because I was wondering if it would mention products like the Noken and Truetune... which have been mentioned in editorial and discussed in the forum... it just told me about removing tokens (as per Fox's own instructions and the kind of result you'd get from any general search engine query).
I try and be positive about the whole site and forum - I feel I get a lot of value from it for my £5/month.
This isn't good though - AI slop that doesn't appear to work if the previous posts are to be believed. A waste of water and energy.
I'll never use it so can I make the speech bubble go away please?
I just asked it some stuff. Seemed like some useful responses, although as with the AI tool we use at work I think the responses are really just a starting point and not something that can be relied upon at the moment.
I just got the Function Call Loop Detected error as well which I think someone above posted an image of.
Does that kind of thing get automatically reported back to STW towers?
Aside from that - the speech bubble is also in the way of the 'back to top' button for me, on Edge browser on a laptop. It's been mentioned a few times, so guess it will be moved at some point.
I can see the worth in this tool, as it gains more 'knowledge' and experience.
If you want to find out about forum content then the AI contextual search under the 'Talk to Stan' tab is the best way to go, until we've got the chatbot Stan trained on more forum stuff.
I just want to turn that annoying bubble off, if I want to 'talk to Stan' (which I don't) I can use the tab at the top of the page, but the bubble thing is visually too large, and intrusive, so if we can have an option please of getting rid of it... ta
I think Mark might be saying that there’s two Stans, trained on two sets of data? That do different things? “Talk to Stan” to search the forum, “Discuss with Stan” for, er, something else…? Example on the previous page pointing to content in past mags makes it look useful, if this second Stan is a customer service bot for the mag. From the OP, that’s seems to be what it’s for.
But it's alos not just a tool to free up time for us. It's useful for you guys too. I've seen one query asking Stan for help with setting up a Fox 36 fork, including an explanation of terms like spring rates and other jargon. I thought his response was very good.
TBF, thats the sort of stuff I'd find mega useful (even to the point where I'd consider upgrading to a full member. And Stan isn't now hiding behind the advert bar at the bottom - I'll play with Stan (you betcha) later.
Got to say, I'll never use the AI thing.
No idea why they can't just put the forum tags at the bottom of the page like they used to be rather than having to hit the 'back to top' button then the 'latest' button, or which ever forum you want to go to.
Me neither. I absolutely hate all this Ai shit that's being forced down your throat everywhere you go.
I was annoyed to see the Stan thing on the banner at the top but thought, meh, I can scroll past it, but having it now floating there in that knobby bubble is really grating, sorry.
I imagine there must be some benefit to STW in making users have to tap through as many things as possible instead of simple navigation buttons right where it makes sense to have them. It's a real shame it's going like this. Very alienating. 😐
Please can we switch that bubble off. I know it is traditional for web designers to put whatever they think is most important in that minute to the fore but for me it's just another thing in the way. Please just give me the option to make it **** right off
Stan eh. Wouldn't have anything to do with Kryton57 using the handle "Stan" on bike magic would it? 🙂
I got this far:
"By using Stan, you agree to the recording and processing of your data by our website and the external services it might use (LLMs, vector databases, etc.)." and thought better of it.
TBF to Stan, I asked it to find me a thread that neither the forum search (obvz) nor Google could find and it did so very efficiently. Even if that's all I use it for, that's okay by me
Please can we switch that bubble off. I know it is traditional for web designers to put whatever they think is most important in that minute to the fore but for me it's just another thing in the way. Please just give me the option to make it **** right off
I said as much too, it's way worse on my phone, on the laptop the bubble thing is less intrusive but still irritating...
I think Mark might be saying that there’s two Stans, trained on two sets of data? That do different things? “Talk to Stan” to search the forum, “Discuss with Stan” for, er, something else…? Example on the previous page pointing to content in past mags makes it look useful, if this second Stan is a customer service bot for the mag. From the OP, that’s seems to be what it’s for.
Yes, the 'Talk to Stan' is a separate AI that is built into the forum. The chatbot was getting very little use but the AI serach is being used a lot. So that Forum Chatbot is disabled. The new Stan is the one you can chat to and with the speech button (I know some don't like it) being present on the screen on all pages is getting LOTS of use. The label 'Talk to Stan' is about to be renamed 'Search the forum'. When you open that tab you have the option of using the AI search or the standard search. The AI search is lots better but there's a choice.
The AI search works much better if you treat it as a person. Rather than just enter a single word to search for, give it some context. It works better if you give it a sentence. eg. 'Mavic wheels' is a traditional search term example. But you will get much better results if you use the AI search and use a phrase like, 'Opinions on mavic wheels'.
And I'll repeat again, we can see all the discussions with Stan and he's very well trained on what he can and can't do. So those who keep asking him to delete my account can stop now 😉
TBF to Stan, I asked it to find me a thread that neither the forum search (obvz) nor Google could find and it did so very efficiently. Even if that's all I use it for, that's okay by me
OK, I was totally unconvinced, but frankly this sounds like some sort of magic! Who knew it was that simple...
TBF to Stan, I asked it to find me a thread that neither the forum search (obvz) nor Google could find and it did so very efficiently. Even if that's all I use it for, that's okay by me
May as well walk out into the street, grab the nearest person/dog/cat/bird/worm and ask them to find the thread you're looking for.
I've seen one query asking Stan for help with setting up a Fox 36 fork, including an explanation of terms like spring rates and other jargon. I thought his response was very good.
I'm not sure I'd be keen risking my money and/or wellbeing asking AI for tech. advice. I once asked Gemini (or at least whatever aspect of Gemini is attached to Google searches) about the compatibility of GRX shifters & a CUES T8000 mech. and was told confidently that they were compatible as they both used the same 1:1 cable pull ratio; I gather that this is utter ballcocks.
Similarly & much later I asked about compatibility between the various GRX group sets (I'd heard that the 820 12 speed stuff might have a new cable pull ratio). Over a few queries I was told that 810 & 820 were compatible & shared the same ratio, that 400 & 810 were compatible (same ratio) but that 400 & 820 weren't compatible as they used a different ratio; it seemed to have no concern about this logic failure. At various points along the journey it would cite links 'confirming' it's answers.
The problem seems to be that AI has no way of telling whether the 'facts' it's learning are correct or not & therefore whether its answers are likewise. I've also don't know how AI manages contradictory information, I've never had an answer stating that opinions vary and seem to get a "this is the way it is" response (I'm guessing that there's some sort of weighting going on).
STW is a famously contrary place and if Stan is learning from thousands of potentially shouty, opinionated posts the poor fella's going to get properly confused.
I put in a simple and common tech/advice question here and on Claude to compare results (Claude was limited to information found on the STW forum).
Stan repeated some technical fallacies (aka BS, tbh) that are common on here and online generally. But the advice wasn't bad for a part subjective and part technical question. The recommendation was a product I'd recognise as a review pick more than a consensus of the forum. If you want an overall summary of 'what STW says' it seems good but that comes with a caveat, right? We all know how much good and poor info is posted on the forum here. The only real complaint was the small box makes reading the reply a bit less easy.
Claude's response was much more nuanced and detailed. Instead of listing some assumptions it generalised the factors to consider and picked out comments or repeated points that are technically correct. The recommendation was one I would be more likely to pick out as the forum opinion choice. The real benefit of the external LLM is that I can then ask it to check the STW forum knowledge against wider resources, materials databases or ergonomics studies etc and the overall UX is much easier.
Stan for site function or account admin seems like a useful addition. For wider info I'm not sure what it adds over the right prompt put into any LLM.
Well done whoever is Stan's handler...
I'm not terribly impressed. Stan can't find the article about the Surly Pugsley fat bike, nor the one about its use on the Canning Stock Route. Those might be in the same issue, IIRC.
Stan pointed me at a search option in the Magazine Library, but the search on that page seems to be the same as the one on every page on the site... which can't find what I'm looking for either.
The best bit of AI related advice I got recently was that typing -ai as a suffix to Google searches gets rid of the AI generated synopsis.
While I appreciate the value LLMs offer for certain applications, the current fascination for lopping AI slop into every aspect of human existence feels like further evidence of our headlong rush towards a dystopian future for the vast majority of us.
Further to using the -ai flag in a Google search, if you go to a Google search results page and click on the "More" dropdown and select the "Web" option then you get a list of web search results - just like what search engines used to provide.
If you have a browser that can set up custom address bar searches or similar then the search string for this version of Google will be something like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web
...but do we really need an AI bot on STW?
.
Curious why STW thought this was necessary, will it really save a corresponding amount of time to the time taken to implement it in the first place?
.
Why do this
it's a pointless gimmick.
Well Mark said
Why a chat bot?
Because we are a small team - Heather works 3days/week and she spends a lot of time on subscriber issues that Stan can deal with 24/7. This will free her and the team up to do other things like development and content creation.
