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Wasn't one of the tenets of SO that the answers were all creative commons and available via a regular data dump. It was a reaction to EE putting up pay walls an

Wasn't one of the tenets of SO that the answers were all creative commons and available via a regular data dump. It was a reaction to EE putting up pay walls and locking peoples own answers up. The idea was whatever you contribute here won't ever be locked up like that. How can they change that? Does the creative commons somehow prohibit using in training sets? What does attribution mean in that case? Are the data dumps still happening? (( Edit: Interesting idea below about a new creative commons that asks for a model trained on the data to be open. Seems like in the spirit of the CC ))

warp 3y ago
It looks they announced two changes here: 1. They are charging for use of the Overflow API, not the data itself. 2. They are enforcing the attribution clause of the existing CC-BY-SA license on the content. In their opinion if an AI bot answer includes parts from the stack overflow API (or data dump?), it should credit the most closely matching answer by linking back to stack overflow.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  Excellent answer. Following up on the parent, for those who don't already know, EE = ExpertsExchange, an older question-answer website that got strong Google SEO for the questions but eventually hid the actual answers behind a paywall. If you wanted to see the answer, you had to pay. StackOverflow was, at least partially, a reaction to that in the beginning. There was initially some confusion about the license behind the answers, and they went through some license-spinning (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing). Now, most things at StackOverflow (and the other StackExchange websites) are under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0. Important to point out that there is no ban on training in any of those licenses, probably because they were written before that was even a thing. However, regardless (and the obligatory IANAL), that attribution clause should certainly be included, if it was directly derivative of the code on SO. (How to track thousands of attributions across a large codebase is another question.) Whether closing down the API is abiding by the spirit of the license is an open question, but it certainly seems to be allowed by the letter of the license. My personal feeling is that this is rowing upstream, and that the large and incredibly-well-funded companies like OpenAI, Claude, Google, and Meta have already scraped all of that historical data, so this really only hurts the new startups that are poorly funded. However, I'm sure that making this deal with Google et al will be a good thing for Stack Exchange as a whole and perhaps the funding will breathe new life into Stack Overflow (et al).
  - pennomi 3y ago
    It’s probably considered enough of a transformation that it no longer falls under the license, but that’s the main question on copyright that’s getting solved in courts right now anyway. I wonder if the Share Alike license could be updated to include sharing models trained on that data. I’d certainly like to see more CC-licensed models out there.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Can't wait for the avalanche of excuses from AI proponents about how attribution is impossible because their stealing machine totally doesn't steal and even if it did couldn't tell you what it's stealing from and anyway this is the FUTURE!!!1! How dare you be opposed to literally any technological change we decide to call progress go back to your cave luddite
- fabian2k 3y ago
  It is not clear if they can enforce the CC license at all here, they are not the authors of the content and their ToS do not contain any clause to delegate enforcement to SE.
nicklecompte 3y ago
I assume those ideas were formulated around 2000ish, when humanity's smartest computers were at best as smart as nematodes and incapable of using language convincingly. Now that humanity's smartest computers are as smart as an ant colony, it turns out that with enough data they can use human language convincingly, which is very interesting but nevertheless a serious challenge to existing ideas around copyright. It's not enough to completely pull up the drawbridge so that humans can't freely access the data. But it's reasonable for a community-driven org like SO to be concerned about fundamentally dumb robots like GPT-4 threatening their survival and their mission. Let me add that Google and OpenAI are fully aware that their tech is useless in the medium-term without technically-skilled humans contributing actual human thoughts to places like Stack Overflow.

warp 3y ago

It looks they announced two changes here: 1. They are charging for use of the Overflow API, not the data itself. 2. They are enforcing the attribution clause of the existing CC-BY-SA license on the content. In their opinion if an AI bot answer includes parts from the stack overflow API (or data dump?), it should credit the most closely matching answer by linking back to stack overflow.

gunapologist99 3y ago
Excellent answer. Following up on the parent, for those who don't already know, EE = ExpertsExchange, an older question-answer website that got strong Google SEO for the questions but eventually hid the actual answers behind a paywall. If you wanted to see the answer, you had to pay. StackOverflow was, at least partially, a reaction to that in the beginning. There was initially some confusion about the license behind the answers, and they went through some license-spinning (https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing). Now, most things at StackOverflow (and the other StackExchange websites) are under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0. Important to point out that there is no ban on training in any of those licenses, probably because they were written before that was even a thing. However, regardless (and the obligatory IANAL), that attribution clause should certainly be included, if it was directly derivative of the code on SO. (How to track thousands of attributions across a large codebase is another question.) Whether closing down the API is abiding by the spirit of the license is an open question, but it certainly seems to be allowed by the letter of the license. My personal feeling is that this is rowing upstream, and that the large and incredibly-well-funded companies like OpenAI, Claude, Google, and Meta have already scraped all of that historical data, so this really only hurts the new startups that are poorly funded. However, I'm sure that making this deal with Google et al will be a good thing for Stack Exchange as a whole and perhaps the funding will breathe new life into Stack Overflow (et al).
- pennomi 3y ago
  It’s probably considered enough of a transformation that it no longer falls under the license, but that’s the main question on copyright that’s getting solved in courts right now anyway. I wonder if the Share Alike license could be updated to include sharing models trained on that data. I’d certainly like to see more CC-licensed models out there.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
Can't wait for the avalanche of excuses from AI proponents about how attribution is impossible because their stealing machine totally doesn't steal and even if it did couldn't tell you what it's stealing from and anyway this is the FUTURE!!!1! How dare you be opposed to literally any technological change we decide to call progress go back to your cave luddite
fabian2k 3y ago
It is not clear if they can enforce the CC license at all here, they are not the authors of the content and their ToS do not contain any clause to delegate enforcement to SE.

nicklecompte 3y ago

I assume those ideas were formulated around 2000ish, when humanity's smartest computers were at best as smart as nematodes and incapable of using language convincingly. Now that humanity's smartest computers are as smart as an ant colony, it turns out that with enough data they can use human language convincingly, which is very interesting but nevertheless a serious challenge to existing ideas around copyright. It's not enough to completely pull up the drawbridge so that humans can't freely access the data. But it's reasonable for a community-driven org like SO to be concerned about fundamentally dumb robots like GPT-4 threatening their survival and their mission. Let me add that Google and OpenAI are fully aware that their tech is useless in the medium-term without technically-skilled humans contributing actual human thoughts to places like Stack Overflow.