Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal
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Compare and contrast.
Exhibit A:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914
Exhibit B:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xKM3mGt2pE
For the record, I prefer the second - maybe it's my age and life experience, but it sings to me in a way that the first doesn't.
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Do you have a legal reference for that opinion? copyright is usually asserted per file of source code, containing maybe one class’s implementation (let’s not cite google/oracle here), in my experience.
There is also a difference in ‘putting it on SO’ and ‘copying off SO and putting in another project (possibly closed source, or for profit’.
Devs get one no-blame free-pass do over from me when they unthinkingly cut and paste from SO - the second offence is not so easily over looked.
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Jesus, really?
It's the difference between helping someone like me do their job better vs. helping someone put people like me out of work altogether.
How is that not clear? How is that not obvious?
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Like others are going to say. The site was fed in as training data long ago. This just makes it official.
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The simplest form of protest would be to stop using Stack Overflow. If people keep contributing to it as a whole, then I would view it as acceptance to the OpenAI deal.
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Time for the top answerers to delete their accounts and launch a competing website. Stack Overflow will be useless if they suffer brain drain as a result of this, that is the surest way to show that this kind of nonsense will not be tolerated.
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People have forgotten that workers used to drag owners and managers out of their houses and beat/kill them in front of their families....maybe we need to remember history.....
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Joel Spolsky is the one founder I'm aware of. For a couple of years I read his blog, which I found informative. You'll find this article from 2021 there, announcing that SO was sold to an investment company:
So the current development seems to follow the long "tradition" of tech companies that went down the drain when the original "techies" founders leave the company and MBAs take over.
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Ahh. Yet another salient example of "nothing is free. If it's free it just means you are the product".
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All the AI will result in knowledge being stuffed behind paywalls. Want to lookup an oddball setup and query for WorkDay? Now you got to get an account, bound to a credit card with x number of lookups per day to thwart AI Scraping.
Instead of open, collaborative knowledge paywalls will go up.
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We need to go back to web forums. Do we really need to use some giant centralized company's product? We didn't in the 90s. News groups used to be amazing and mostly decentralized.
Remember, nothings free. If your not paying for a subscription, or donating bandwidth/drive space (p2p) then most likely you are (or will be) the product.
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Apple fanboy 101
Ars Tribunus Militum
Unfortunately that’s not how most people think. They talk a lot but rarely turn their words into action.
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That's probably a good way of looking at it. How well the weavers fared after 1801 is also worth considering.There's actually a nuanced version of this viewpoint.
There are people who love AI, but doesn't like the way certain AI companies are "strip-mining" the training data without respect for copyrights and/or otherwise not respecting for content creators.
I have been reading on both the pro-AI and anti-AI viewpoints and have come to realize that some of this is very nuanced.
One of the many examples are content creators whose content has been incorporated into current AI's and able to regurgitate almost everything that person wrote, even in niche industries, to the point where they are aghast.
Another of the many examples are the resentments by people who have been laid off by AI, or are threatened to be. Basically the Jacquard Loom Riots of 1801factor. If you read up the history, it is pretty clearly what some of these people are doing. Coders -- users of StackOverflow -- are especially vulnerable.
I don't like the loss of StackOverflow knowledge by sabotaging past posts, but when viewed through the lens of the Jacquard Loom Riots, it begins to make sense and sadly understandable, even if not necessarily endorseable.
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(Snip)
AI doesn't do that yet. The human brain is a pattern machine, and a soup of chemicals. It's not a singular magical object that's impossible to duplicate outside of divine hands.
AI will be disruptive, just like most other major technological leaps. I'm not sure how old the average posters are on here but do any of you remember the breakpoint of the internet era? That point in time where it started destroying businesses and business ideas that couldn't survive in an internet connected world?
Either AI will be able to replace coders or it won't. It will be able to replace artists, or it won't. If it can replace either of those professions, even a moderate amount, it will totally upend the way the economy is designed to function.
The refrain with automation was always that it would free humanity from manual labor, and I still believe that. The problem is if you free humans from manual labor and free them from a big chunk of mental labor then they don't really have much to fall back on anymore. So you either need to re-calibrate the economy so that the labor that robots and AI are doing directly fund the people they replaced, or, you need far less people.
I'm a bit nihilistic and so don't have a lot of faith in humanity to make an adjustment like that and it work in most people's favor. In fact, history doesn't support having much faith in that either. And current events show us that there are plenty of regimes (and their subjects) around the world that are not concerned with the general welfare of humanity either.
Let's maybe think about that before we hand over the reins of censorship and free speech, or get in too much of a hurry to toss either of those first two constitutional admendments under the bus (for those of us in the US anyway).
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Hmm. If only there was an existing method of finding knowledge on the internet based on text input from a user.
Like some sort of engine, that searches for you....
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Something else worth looking at is how everyone fared after all of that. The factory system harmed the hand weavers for sure. But drastically improved everyone else's lives over time. The world would look vastly different today (and much more similar to the 1800s) if none of that had happened.
Of course that doesn't really help the loom workers of the time who lost their income, possibly their homes or even their lives.
Sigh. Right back to nihilism.
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ChrisMarshallNY
Ars Praetorian
They absolutely don't, but many, MANY others do. It's not accurate to suggest that a condescending, patronizing affect is not prevalent. It's so endemic that it is a meme.
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That said, the answers are often useful and correct, which is why I generally ignore the slaps. It's just rather puerile, and quite annoying, as, speaking only for myself, I'm an experienced engineer, with decades of shipping software behind me, and being treated like a lazy freshman is pretty annoying.
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I would think they'll have a influx of people from "California" making CCPA requests.
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Because, at the very same time, people are saying that AI produces shit output, hallucinates, and will get worse and worse over time.
How can THAT put people like you out of work?
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ChrisMarshallNY
Ars Praetorian
I haven't asked/answered a question on SO for ages. I may, occasionally, do so, but I haven't found the will, in a while.
Most of my SO karma is from the questions that I asked, as opposed to the answers I gave, so it doesn't really bother me.
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Hmmm. There's another piece to this story ya might have missed, Benj. The headline is this:
"Private equity-owned Stack Exchange Inc ditches sustainable business model, switches to harvesting assets."
Yesterday I got a popup alert on StackOverflow announcing something called StackOverflow Jobs by Indeed. WHAAAAT? The whole idea of StackOverflow was to create a highly effective tech recruiting platform by scoring publicly shared expertise. That was the WHOLE DEAL. It generated a huge trove of really good written material, not to mention a nice payday for Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and their team.
(Save the snark, OK? StackOverflow is exactly the kind of human-generated material LLMs must ingest to do what they do. It's even got crowdsourced quality ratings.)
They've dumped the recruiting biz, and sold the assets to Open AI? You think they care whether their contributors are upset? Naaah. Laffing all the way to the investment bank.
"Private equity-owned Stack Exchange Inc ditches sustainable business model, switches to harvesting assets."
Yesterday I got a popup alert on StackOverflow announcing something called StackOverflow Jobs by Indeed. WHAAAAT? The whole idea of StackOverflow was to create a highly effective tech recruiting platform by scoring publicly shared expertise. That was the WHOLE DEAL. It generated a huge trove of really good written material, not to mention a nice payday for Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and their team.
(Save the snark, OK? StackOverflow is exactly the kind of human-generated material LLMs must ingest to do what they do. It's even got crowdsourced quality ratings.)
They've dumped the recruiting biz, and sold the assets to Open AI? You think they care whether their contributors are upset? Naaah. Laffing all the way to the investment bank.
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I don't see any inconsistency here. Stack Overflow was against hosting content produced by ChatGPT because they were planning to sell all their human-generated content to ChatGPT. They didn't have a negative stance towards AI in general, they had a negative stance towards AI contaminating their valuable training data before they were able to sell it.
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When I used Stack Overflow, the most useful stuff was the description and additional comments. It wasn’t so much “here’s the answer”, much as looking at the why and the ensuing discussion. I might accept one answer, but the comments others had would influence how I resolved the issue.
What worries me is that the AI will miss the subtleties in proclaiming the one and true answer. We’ll end up with users simply copying and pasting, not understanding why. These users won’t be able to contribute back to SO. Within a decade SO will be about as useful as Yahoo Answers.
This doesn’t surprise me. This is Gracenote all over again.
When CDs came out, the music was there, but not any information of who or what. In the early 1990, the open source CD Database (CDDB) used checksums to identify music tracks and the CD. Volunteers would put entries into a giant database. Programs could use that database whenever someone ripped a CD. Put in a CD into your Mac and iTunes would identify it.
Not even a decade later, CDDB went from open source project to private company and renamed Gracenote. All of the free work volunteers put in was now owned. It was worth over a quarter billion dollars.
There were protests and lawsuits, but in the end, the data was just too valuable to be given away for free. All of this took place way before AI existed.
As we discovered way back in the 16th Century, if something is valuable, people will transverse entire oceans, desserts, and jungles to proclaim ownership over it.
What worries me is that the AI will miss the subtleties in proclaiming the one and true answer. We’ll end up with users simply copying and pasting, not understanding why. These users won’t be able to contribute back to SO. Within a decade SO will be about as useful as Yahoo Answers.
This doesn’t surprise me. This is Gracenote all over again.
When CDs came out, the music was there, but not any information of who or what. In the early 1990, the open source CD Database (CDDB) used checksums to identify music tracks and the CD. Volunteers would put entries into a giant database. Programs could use that database whenever someone ripped a CD. Put in a CD into your Mac and iTunes would identify it.
Not even a decade later, CDDB went from open source project to private company and renamed Gracenote. All of the free work volunteers put in was now owned. It was worth over a quarter billion dollars.
There were protests and lawsuits, but in the end, the data was just too valuable to be given away for free. All of this took place way before AI existed.
As we discovered way back in the 16th Century, if something is valuable, people will transverse entire oceans, desserts, and jungles to proclaim ownership over it.
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The real surprise is that SO didn't monetize user content before.
I fully expect the billionaire owners of Ars to try to monetize my most-useless posts.
I fully expect the billionaire owners of Ars to try to monetize my most-useless posts.
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If the code works, and does what its intended to do how do you even police this? Unless you have memorized every SO answer, how do you even know its from SO? Are you googling every single line of code to make sure it doesnt show up?
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Stackoverflow had a weird license for a while now to where if you work at a corporation, there is literally a tool to detect if your project contains Stackoverlow code. There used to be a common saying "I don't know, I just copied it from StackOverflow". Yeah, that's not said anymore,
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Do tell us how "actually read the terms" would have helped someone who joined up, say, 5 years ago?
Even if the necessary banalities about rights assignment to put SO in a position to make data commercially available were in place; they meant something considerably different back before chatbots took a substantial leap into the "will be a prolific and unreliable confabulator until it replaces you" zone.
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password123
Ars Scholae Palatinae
LOL now SO is even worse than experts exchange.com or whatever that crappy forum is called
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the cynic in me finds it amusing that anyone trusts or respects any company. That they can feel betrayed by SO, instaed of assuming that SO will do whatever makes them the most money at that moment, users be damned
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My only logical solution to this trend is total stop of contributing anything anywhere, deleting all sorts of accounts, and starting to treat internet as read only (if even that...). I have no say in which site is gobbled up next, so I must act preemptively.
The Internet of old was a fun place, this modern internet is crap.
Thanks for reading this comment, which turned out to be my last contribution
To be fair, your policy seems to be almost a decade old.
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adrianovaroli
Ars Tribunus Militum
Because the people that do the hiring and firing think that AI produces good output, does not hallucinate, and believe it will get better and better over time, despite the evidence.
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automated farm equipment automated away ~90% of jobs. I guess you are big mad about tractors and combines too, right?
Those 2 things are the exact same thing. Most tech fields are competitive, and most tech is meant to replace jobs. Most jobs people held 200 years ago were entirely replaced by new tech.
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I have, but only on TeX.se where some of the major package maintainers (egreg, for example) would provide a lot of detailed help.
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