A deal between Stack Overflow and OpenAI appears to have triggered a battle between the developer discussion board and its customers.
On Monday, Stack Overflow introduced a brand new deal by which person content material could be scooped up by OpenAI to coach ChatGPT. As a discussion board for builders and programmers, Stack Overflow is residence to technical posts and content material that’s priceless to a generative AI service like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The announcement, nonetheless, compelled a minimum of one person to change his posts in protest. That in flip prompted Stack Overflow to droop that person’s account for per week. In a publish on Mastodon, an Epic Video games developer named Ben stated that he tried to take away content material from his Stack Overflow posts in response to the discussion board’s partnership with OpenAI.
As a result of Stack Overflow would not allow you to delete questions which have accepted solutions and lots of upvotes, Ben protested by altering the content material of his inquiries to say: “I’ve eliminated this query in protest of Stack Overflow’s resolution to companion with OpenAI. This transfer steals the labor of everybody who contributed to Stack Overflow, with no method to opt-out. OpenAI has a historical past of flooding the online with inaccurate data and explicitly states that they may by no means pay creators for his or her work.”
Inside an hour, moderators on the discussion board had reverted Ben’s inquiries to their unique states and suspended his account for seven days. Per Ben’s Mastodon publish, a discover from the Stack Overflow moderation crew instructed him that he had lately eliminated or defaced content material from one in all his posts.
“Please notice that after you publish a query or reply to this web site, these posts grow to be a part of the collective effort of others who’ve additionally contributed to that content material,” the discover added. “Posts which are doubtlessly helpful to others shouldn’t be eliminated besides underneath extraordinary circumstances.”
The moderators concluded by saying that after the matter is resolved, his fame rating can be restored and his account will resume as regular.
Following up on his preliminary Mastodon publish, Ben stated that he had requested Stack Overflow to completely delete his questions and solutions underneath GDPR. He additionally criticized the OpenAI’s information scraping.
“It is only a reminder that something you publish on any of those platforms can and can be used for revenue,” Ben wrote. “It is only a matter of time till all of your messages on Discord, Twitter, and many others. are scraped, fed right into a mannequin and offered again to you.”
Different Stack Overflow customers have chimed in with questions and complaints concerning the OpenAI deal. One particular person requested: “The place is the opt-out possibility, so my solutions do not get utilized by OpenAI?” One other particular person requested if Stack Overflow customers are legally entitled to any advantages from the OpenAI deal.”
The battle raises the query: Who owns the information that you simply publish on a public discussion board? GDPR has a “proper to be forgotten” measure in which you’ll be able to request that your information be faraway from an internet site, however this sometimes applies to private or delicate data.
Stack Overflow’s Phrases of Service state that “when you place content material within the public sphere, you willingly quit some rights and management over such content material.” Moreover, the discussion board helps you to delete a query or publish, however provided that nobody else has responded to it. As soon as a publish generates solutions and even upvotes, you are strongly discouraged from eradicating it.
This conflict additionally highlights points round generative AI and information gathering. What occurs when a public web site permits its content material to be scraped by AI? Do the creators of that content material have any say within the matter?
Stack Overflow is dealing with a backlash partly as a result of the corporate had beforehand resisted the lure of AI. In a coverage publish from late 2022, the positioning banned using ChatGPT and different generative AI instruments when writing or rewriting content material. Now, AI appears to be okay, so long as it generates income for the corporate.
