Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

This is similar to when I heard reddit was doing the API lockdown, I wrote an automation bot over the weekend that self-destructed my subreddit and the entire post history. The bot also automatically downloaded and archived all of the content on my local machine.

It was annoying because at first I couldn't get access to older posts since at the time reddit had changed their API to only show the first X posts (100 or 1,000 or whatever). So I told my bot to delete the posts as it archived them so as I deleted content, reddit had no choice but to populate the page with the older posts.

And that's how I archived my subreddit. Reddit banned me two days later for automation, lol. I did not break any of the reddit or reddit api ToS during this process but I guess I upset someone.

I feel like this content craze is going to evaporate soon because all the new content from here forward is sure to be polluted by LLM output already. AI is fast becoming a snake eating its own tail.

That reminds me. I should go update my licenses to spit in the face of AI training companies.

Stack Overflow just earned a place under Reddit in the hosts block list.

It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you

As if it didn't happen already

I think people would have less issues with AI training if it was non-profit and for the common good. And there are open source AI projects, many in fact. But yeah, these deals by companies like this are sleazy.

StackOverflow: grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way

Users: try to delete it all to prevent it

StackOverflow: your contributions belong to the community, you can't do that

Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.

Data Rule Numero Uno:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That's 80% of Stack Overflows content.

Good luck with the deleting. It often just means UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.

Like AI doesn't know how to use the way back machine?

There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It's not a forum; there's no such thing as "your posts." It's more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren't "yours" any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don't have the right to take it back.

Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don't think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like "destroying it to save it."

Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.

Based users

This feels a little iffy to me. it rings of what happened with reddit.

This is a violation of GDPR, no?

EDIT: user created content is not directly protected under GDPR, only personally identifiable data is pertected under GDPR.

This isn't really comparable to reddit, since users can just send a request to SO for all the content. Reddit locking down the API meant we lost access to our content.

Why delete the answer, why not edit it so that a human can see the answer but for AI its a load of nonsense?

I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it's derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.

So what is the stack overflow replacement?

Does GDPR apply to stackoverflow? Since my data there probably does not identify me as a person?

This shit scares me. It will become so easy to rewrite history from here. Just delete anything you don't like and have an ai rewrite into whatever you want. Entire threads rewritten, a company can go back and have your entire post history can be changed in ways that might be legally compromising.