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StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI

109 points by bundie 2y ago

skilled 2y ago
> As a result, they have started suspending accounts that engage in this behavior. It's important to note that the "right to forget" no longer applies to your answers, as per StackOverflow's Terms and Conditions, which grant them special permission to retain all answers. SO can actually do this? I was surprised by this partnership to be honest, but I don’t blame contributors picking a side on this. SO is merely a provider of infrastructure, but the way that OpenAI wants to monetise people only benefits them and SO directly.
- Arnt 2y ago
  I'm a minor SO contributor, about one answer per week. I answer questions in order to spread the knowledge. From my viewpoint it's a deal where two companies try to make a profit by helping me spread knowledge — what is there not to like?
  - skilled 2y ago
    Nothing wrong with what you are saying but this is being showed down people’s throats without an option to opt-out, that is why I am asking can SO even do that. Not everyone agrees with OpenAI, etc. This is about giving people an option as opposed to be being told “no” and thats the end of it.
    - Arnt 2y ago
      Oh well, when I joined the terms included "anyone can download a complete SQL dump of the site" and of course anyone includes all the people I don't like. I knew that, you knew that, we all knew that.
bearjaws 2y ago
Must be fun working at StackOverflow with a gun held to your head now that OAI ate your lunch.
jjgreen 2y ago
I'm sure people will remember that when next minded to answer a question on SO.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
grobbyy 2y ago
This is where GDPR and friends should come in. If they won't do it the friendly way, they should do it the hard way. Lawyers are a little more expensive than handling a click, especially at scale.
- dubcanada 2y ago
  Not sure how GDPR applies to content you wrote using another service. GDPR does not apply to the content you wrote on Facebook, it only applies to your personal information Facebook is collecting while you write said content.
- dailykoder 2y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This is exactly what GDPR was made for. Good thing I have only like 2 answers on SO, lol.
  - Richyrichy3234 2y ago
    GDPR allows you to get your personal identifiable information removed, not content. And GDPR is an eu thing not a usa thing.
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    It's annoying that people treat GDPR like a magic word that lets them do whatever they want. It only covers personal data -- as in, your name, address, phone number, email, any other identifiable information, etc.
- gruez 2y ago
  Does GDPR apply to non-personal data that you've generated?
  - Qem 2y ago
    Stylometric analysis can be used to link texts you write to your identity, even if written anonymously. These are grounds to claim the texts you write are inherently personal. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
ChrisLTD 2y ago
It’s sad to see the death pangs of one of the most useful resources of my career.
- golol 2y ago
  Stackoverflow is and will be fine, what are you basing this panic on?
  - tempest_ 2y ago
    Many many people use Copilot / ChatGPT in place of stack overflow for all the obvious reasons.
    - golol 2y ago
      Yes and that either works perfectly and Stackoverflow is not needed, or it doesn’t work and we keep using Stackoverflow. In reality it is of course a mix of the two. My point is, we’re not just going to sit around and twiddle our thumbs if there is a dramatic drop in the accessibility of Q&A. We’ll do something! Just like when Stackoverflow was created.
  - rrwo 2y ago
    Stack Overflow has been less useful for several years before OpenAI. I find for web technologies it's less useful because the technologies keep change, and what was a good answer in 2010 is not now. To answer questions I find it more useful to consult a primary source, such as the documentation on a some software's website, or a forum dedicated to that software. On SO I often get no replies, or unhelpful and often toxic comments along the lines of "Technology X is bad, use Y instead". Or I often get people who answer the question as if they show applying for a job at Google. No, I just need help with some software to process a few thousand rows and send a summary once a month by email. I'm not trying to process petabytes of data with a response time of <1ms.
jjgreen 2y ago
Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. How about repeatedly changing just a few characters, corrupting the post over a period of time? (Entrepreneurs: you can have "SO post gradual corruption as a service" for free, you're welcome)
- surfingdino 2y ago
  So you propose intentional answer rot?
  - jjgreen 2y ago
    Let's call it "composting"
- gruez 2y ago
  1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. 2. This seems easily detectable, by checking edit volumes of a given user and/or post. Even 1 edit per month is probably going to be suspect compared to how infrequently posts actually get edited.
  - jjgreen 2y ago
    No crusade, just offering constructive suggestions to the OP. Detectable, maybe -- month one, a few homonyms which could be spelling corrections: been -> bean etc, month two, (near-) synonyms: bean -> lentil ... throw in a few UFT8 homglyphs to add noise. Unlikely that that sort of corruption would be obvious to a machine, then manual checking is needed, and do they have the manpower for that?
    - tivert 2y ago
      It's also a programming website, so that kind of thing would probably be even better targeted at code examples and keywords (e.g. change a function name to something subtly inappropriate). That would have the added value of helping to make the derivative AI suggest errors, making it even less useful. Also one could also use a "masking" edit. Make the defacing change then another more innocuous one. > throw in a few [UTF8] homglyphs to add noise That seems like it could be defeated by a pretty straightforward normalization task. Either just a straight mapping or a mapping that's applied contextually (e.g. replace an omicron with an o, but only when the adjacent characters are ASCII).
arp242 2y ago
Preventing people from deleting all their answers has long been the policy; this is nothing new. And before anyone brings it up: GDPR does not mean "every single bit of information I ever wrote can be deleted whenever I want". Not on HN, and certainly not on Stack Overflow where you agreed to have everything under the CC license. It's painful how badly some people understand the GDPR.
- 1f60c 2y ago
  According to OSNews' quote of the source, it's not even a permanent ban (as the title on HN implies), but a 7-day ban. https://www.osnews.com/story/139601/stack-overflow-signs-deal-with-openai-bans-users-trying-to-alter-answers/ https://www.osnews.com/story/139601/stack-overflow-signs-dea...
  - arp242 2y ago
    You need to try very very hard to get a permanent ban on Stack Overflow. And even most "permanent" bans are only for 10 years. There are some exceptions, but it's rare and only after persistent serious long-term abuse and all the shorter bans didn't work.
- consp 2y ago
  > Not on HN From the privacy policy: > you represent and warrant that you own all right, title and interest in and to such User Content, including, without limitation, all copyrights and rights of publicity contained therein So I'm pressing X for doubt, but someone with legal knowledge may enlighten me otherwise.
  - arp242 2y ago
    Public comments are not personal data, either in the "common sense" meaning or as defined by the GDPR. Maybe purely legally you can revoke permission for HN to publish your comments, I'm not sure about that, but that's a completely different copyright thing unrelated to GDPR.
    - 2y ago
zdimension 2y ago
Title is a little misleading. Regardless of one's opinion on StackOverflow's partnership with OpenAI, editing existing questions & answers to replace them with protest messages fully fits their rules' definition of defacing. Editing the answers through SO's tools is not the right way to protest (since it's trivial for them to suspend you because you're clearly violating their rules); the GDPR is. Making a GDPR deletion request is quite easy.
- dartos 2y ago
  I don’t think questions and answers that were willingly published count as GDPR data. SO probably retains rights to them.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    And not even just SO. They were licensed to you, me and everyone else under Creative Commons, the OP can't just revoke the license.
  - arp242 2y ago
    User content is explicitly licensed under CC-BY-SA. Claiming GDPR on it is just as silly as claiming GDPR because someone forked your GPL project in a way you didn't like.
- viraptor 2y ago
  It's still a good protest if you're not covered by GDPR. As long as you don't care about the account that is - I suspect you're going to be banned after a few times. But there's only so many people able to review changes/flags. Enough people could totally DoS the review system and force some changes.
  - Richyrichy3234 2y ago
    Its very easy. No one is editing their posts constantly and with high change. Take your backups (you have anyway), diff the content, allow only minor changes and a max edit limit of x, restore the content if those criteria are not met. Sure it costs a week or a month to add this feature to the platform but data will not be lost. Nonetheless, SO is not the only ones having an archive of SO
wodenokoto 2y ago
> It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. Let's be honest, your answers on StackOverflow was never _not_ used for profit.
- duxup 2y ago
  Yeah I’m unsure what they thought the situation with Stack Overflow was…
simonw 2y ago
Here's a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity: https://mastodon.social/@ben@m.benui.ca https://mastodon.social/@ben@m.benui.ca
- d0mine 2y ago
  404
- wallmountedtv 2y ago
  This seems to just 404 for me? Edit: https://hachyderm.io/@ben@m.benui.ca/112396508798014598 https://hachyderm.io/@ben@m.benui.ca/112396508798014598 has it cached for me.
  - jstummbillig 2y ago
    The power of decentralization
  - simonw 2y ago
    Yeah it worked for me the first time and doesn't work now, not sure how to fix that.
    - wallmountedtv 2y ago
      I tried another server and Hachyderm still has it available. Idk why it disappeared off Mastodon Social.
    - NicoJuicy 2y ago
      Makes this statement a bit akward, no? > Here's a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity
      - simonw 2y ago
        I'm not sure what happened, the original link worked for me at first but then it started redirecting to the site that was overwhelmed rather than serving the cached content.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dazzawazza 2y ago
It's nice to see all that effort by the many being monetized by the few so that the many can be off loaded making more money for the few. Well played, well played. Strange game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg
- gruez 2y ago
  >It's nice to see all that effort by the many being monetized by the few That's how the internet worked since web 2.0. Generative AI training is just another way it's being monetized.
- duxup 2y ago
  The many should think about who they give content to. To some extent that’s on them. I doubt they had any reasonable expectation that Stack Overflow was a charity. Also my answer about centering a Div… really isn’t worth much.
- golol 2y ago
  Who is harmed by this deal between Stackoverflow and OpenAI? What’s the problem with OpenAI profiting of the content on Stackoverflow? I profit of it, everyone does. The whole point is to share knowledge for anyone to profit off. There is absolutely no real issue unless one starts arguing about slippery slopes where Stackoverflow monetizes its platform and the website becomes unusable due to AI spam etc. I find these fears quite unrealistic.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    Let's say you spend days or weeks making a piece of art for a friend for their birthday. 2, 3 years later it's no longer hanging their bedroom, and you ask, and they tell you they sold it for $50k. You'd be a bit annoyed on multiple fronts....
    - gruez 2y ago
      >2, 3 years later it's no longer hanging their bedroom, and you ask, and they tell you they sold it for $50k. The analogy fails because in this case, the painting is still on their bedroom, just like how the guy's stackoverflow answer is still on stackoverflow. Moreover, when you contribute to stackoverflow, you agree that your work is licensed under a creative commons license. So it's the equivalent of giving your friend a painting, telling them "oh btw you can do whatever you want with it, as long as you attribute back to me", and then get mad that they digitized it and put it on their blog. Finally, let's be real here. This isn't a painting worth $50k. No one's comment is worth anywhere near that. It's hilarious how many of the same talking points from discussions on piracy from a decade ago has been reused in discussions about LLM training data (eg. "piracy = theft" -> "LLM training = theft")
Richyrichy3234 2y ago
This is just ignorant; Surprise your content is publicly available and used by a company for profit \o/ Srsly... your QA was used in GPT before this agreement already now SO profits from it which makes it in theory better because now SO (the platform you liked before this) is able to continue investing into it and making money / profit which motivates them to keep investing and inovating. Why tf is this a bad thing?
- remram 2y ago
  > public Have you never heard of copyright or licenses? Or what is your point?
  - Richyrichy3234 2y ago
    Yes of course. Did you ever read the service agreement with SO? SO is not GitHub. GitHub has high motivation to protect your (c) for you, SO has not. Never has.
    - remram 2y ago
      I don't understand this new point at all. Both SO and GitHub want people to keep putting their content in there, because it's the entire value proposition of their sites. Both SO and GitHub have specific licenses for content. Where do you see this difference? GitHub already sells Copilot, trained on copyrighted user data. Where do you observe this "motivation"?
udev4096 2y ago
What did you expect from a centralized platform? They will monetize all of your content without thinking twice
- gruez 2y ago
  ...as opposed to non-centralized platforms that certainly won't be scraped by AI companies?
  - tivert 2y ago
    > ...as opposed to non-centralized platforms that certainly won't be scraped by AI companies? You could avoid the scraping by requiring login or maybe having some continuously generated AI noise requiring social context filter out that a scraper wouldn't have (e.g. a bot in a chatroom that spews garbage that everyone knows to put in their killfile).
    - gruez 2y ago
      >You could avoid the scraping by requiring login This is easily bypassed by having some sort of pattern matching sign-up script (because realistically, everyone is going to be using an off-the-shelf solution like wordpresss which you can detect and write scripts for) and paying a captcha solving farm to solve any captchas for you. Practically speaking though, having a signup wall is going to be killer for getting visits. It's already hard enough as it is to get started as an independent writer/blogger with no sign up wall. If you're going to force people to log in as well all that will do is ensure your posts are read by no one. >or maybe having some continuously generated AI noise requiring social context filter out that a scraper wouldn't have (e.g. a bot in a chatroom that spews garbage that everyone knows to put in their killfile). Similar problem to the above. Why would someone want to join your community when the first thing they see is that it has a spam problem that's seemingly unaddressed?
      - tivert 2y ago
        >> You could avoid the scraping by requiring login > This is easily bypassed by having some sort of pattern matching sign-up script I would imagine it's not that easy. At a minimum you could have captchas, and if those stop working you could always add some other friction (like a nominal payment for an account, a la Metafilter). > Similar problem to the above. Why would someone want to join your community when the first thing they see is that it has a spam problem that's seemingly unaddressed? Because they understand the reason, and there emerges some common understanding that's something you need to do to discourage scraping?
luuurker 2y ago
Regarding this title: The user didn't delete answers, they updated them to say something unrelated to the question. I understand the protest, but there's a difference between deleting and what's essentially defacing.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  Moreover, they still have that data juding from OPs screenshot with the diff view, lol. I don't think it would be very hard for AI to figure out that it's a garbage answer and just pull the version before edits. This problem is not a technical one; the companies already have the data.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    No, but the social problem is that StackOverflow's entire reason to exist is to provide correct answers common questions. So of course they will intervene if somebody starts ripping answers off the human facing user interface as well. The net will interpret damage as damage and route around it.
  - greenbit 2y ago
    How is an AI supposed to work that out? Given the talk about how these models have a tendency to confabulate, this would seem problematic. Idk though, maybe this is now a thing?
    - gruez 2y ago
      Not prompt engineer, but can't you ask it to answer yes or no to "Are these two comments vaguely about the same thing"? I'm not sure where the confabulation can happen, aside from misclassification which can be solved by getting a human and/or more LLMs to review the decision.
      - greenbit 2y ago
        Interesting, did not know these things could be used to make assessments, judgments, categorizations, etc. Had been under the impression they just riff out text based on suggestions.
not_a_dane 2y ago
More individuals are increasingly recognizing that we are currently in a medieval era of the Internet. The content and creations we share online today are essentially not entirely our own. Many are eagerly awaiting a transformative moment akin to the French Revolution to rectify this situation.
- golol 2y ago
  I personally hope that nothing changes in this regard. I think it’s great if everyone can use the content that was voluntarily posted online for the whole world to see.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Speaking as someone with 100k rep on SO, I don't mind them using my answers to train the model. What I object to is when the resulting model is not then itself posted online for the whole world to see. If OpenAI actually shared the weights for GPT-4, I would consider it an ethical trade.
    - MiguelX413 2y ago
      Their name is ClosedAI
- gruez 2y ago
  >More individuals are increasingly recognizing that we are currently in a medieval era of the Internet. The content and creations we share online today are essentially not entirely our own. currently? Even in the geocities days, companies can presumably crawl/scrape your site to train their LLMs. The only way of preventing that is by paywalling your site, which I doubt many hobbyist bloggers are going to do.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
smeeth 2y ago
So I totally get that people are upset, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that SO was on the path towards going out of business. If they didn’t change something they would simply cease to exist. Does anyone have a better idea?
- drpossum 2y ago
  They're entitled to their business model. They're not entitled to that business model being successful.
wengo314 2y ago
web2.0 was about user generated content. i would say this is the so-far elusive web3.0
xyst 2y ago
Why would OpenAI even need to partner with SO? Scraping is free. Just shows how much money OpenAI has to spend when they could have got it for free.
- rvnx 2y ago
  Technically, search engines scraping content are doing illegal reproduction of copyrighted works, it's just tolerated by the copyright owners (but not all of them tolerate that; news websites for example).
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    It's not even clear it's illegal; generally, the legality is in the use, not the copying of the data. ... But the easiest way to shortcut all of those thorny open questions is to go through the front door with a big sack of cash and an explicit agreement on how the data will be harvested and what it will be used for.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Technically, search engines scraping content are doing illegal reproduction of copyrighted works I thought it was ruled to be fair use? eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc.
- utopiah 2y ago
  Do they even need scrapping? I'm not OpenAI yet still have SO copy via https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=stack_exchange https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=stack_exchange (which I use for offline trips).
rvnx 2y ago
Since the content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, the solution is to wait until OpenAI eat the content, and ask them to attribute the copyright to you when they create derivative work (e.g. OpenAI models). Seems fair, and provides back the credit to the person who prepared the answer.
- gruez 2y ago
  >and ask them to attribute the copyright to you when they create derivative work Whether LLM training counts as "copying" has yet to be settled in court. Absent that, it's unclear whether attribution is even required. For instance, facts aren't copyrightable, so you can theoretically incorporate facts from other works into your work without attribution.
- remram 2y ago
  How are you going to "ask them"?
quietbritishjim 2y ago
Any content you post on Stack Overflow is licensed (by you) as CC BY-SA [1]. Which is fantastic! Your answer can be freely (with attribution) used elsewhere. Admittedly, the main use has historically been clone websites that just add adverts with no value. But the principle is there. But if anyone has a license to use your content... Then certainly Stack Overflow do! If they want to post an old version of your question/answer that hasn't been overwritten with a message about some cause you care about, important as it may be to you, then they're free to do that. This is not news. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
- rvnx 2y ago
  Not just CC-SA, but CC-BY-SA, this is a big difference, they need to attribute the work to you.
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    Oops! Edited to fix.
- remram 2y ago
  They're free to do that with the VERY TINY requirement of attribution. And they won't even do that. I take this as the giant "F YOU" that it is.
mapcars 2y ago
Not sure exactly what this protest is for, questions and answers both published publicly and anyone can see them without an account and benefit from it. Alright, if they use it to train some AI - what is the big deal? As I understand the original posts are still accessable. Essentially users will be paying for faster search and better precision since you can do the same without payed AI.
biglyburrito 2y ago
No more answering questions on StackOverflow, then -- easy peasy.
rickydroll 2y ago
Would there be all this Sturm und Drang if the LLM models generated from stack overflow (and other) content were considered a social good and available at no cost? Or perhaps the turmoil comes from the fact that somebody else is making profits with no oversight, and it's not really about the LLM mechanism and toolchain itself.
- int_19h 2y ago
  I think it varies from person to person. Speaking for myself, I agree with the way you put it. If it matters, I'm in the top 0.15% of SO contributors, although most of that has been in its early years. But other people might be opposed to AI on principle, or consider it a threat to their job etc.
dsign 2y ago
At some level, I feel like the guy is an extremist with his opposition to OpenAI and AI in general. But it could be that he is on the right, that we are slowly creating a successor species, and that we are not reacting with enough force because of our cultural inertia.
HeavyStorm 2y ago
I don't get this self-entitlement... It sounds so childish. The same users erasing posts have used knowledge on SO to do their jobs, therefore profiting from it. Now SO will profit from it, and so will OpenAI, as they should. Also, answers are edotsble by other users, so you don't own them after you post them.
- holsta 2y ago
  The answers are licensed under CC-BY-SA. It matters.
  - Vingdoloras 2y ago
    CC-BY-SA is a perpetual license, so the author can't just decide that they don't want StackOverflow to have access to the content anymore.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      The point is that OpenAI is not sharing the result of that training with us, nor even the training set. In other words, they are ignoring both "attribution" and "share-alike" parts of the license, claiming that it's not applicable because what they are doing is fair use, and so copyright is not a concern.
knoopx 2y ago
lol, I hope Mr. Altman finds my 10 year old posts relevant
maxen 2y ago
Wow,Thats unfair

109 points by bundie 2y ago

> As a result, they have started suspending accounts that engage in this behavior. It's important to note that the "right to forget" no longer applies to your answers, as per StackOverflow's Terms and Conditions, which grant them special permission to retain all answers. SO can actually do this? I was surprised by this partnership to be honest, but I don’t blame contributors picking a side on this. SO is merely a provider of infrastructure, but the way that OpenAI wants to monetise people only benefits them and SO directly.

Arnt 2y ago
I'm a minor SO contributor, about one answer per week. I answer questions in order to spread the knowledge. From my viewpoint it's a deal where two companies try to make a profit by helping me spread knowledge — what is there not to like?
- skilled 2y ago
  Nothing wrong with what you are saying but this is being showed down people’s throats without an option to opt-out, that is why I am asking can SO even do that. Not everyone agrees with OpenAI, etc. This is about giving people an option as opposed to be being told “no” and thats the end of it.
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Oh well, when I joined the terms included "anyone can download a complete SQL dump of the site" and of course anyone includes all the people I don't like. I knew that, you knew that, we all knew that.

bearjaws 2y ago

Must be fun working at StackOverflow with a gun held to your head now that OAI ate your lunch.

jjgreen 2y ago

I'm sure people will remember that when next minded to answer a question on SO.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

grobbyy 2y ago

This is where GDPR and friends should come in. If they won't do it the friendly way, they should do it the hard way. Lawyers are a little more expensive than handling a click, especially at scale.

dubcanada 2y ago
Not sure how GDPR applies to content you wrote using another service. GDPR does not apply to the content you wrote on Facebook, it only applies to your personal information Facebook is collecting while you write said content.
dailykoder 2y ago
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This is exactly what GDPR was made for. Good thing I have only like 2 answers on SO, lol.
- Richyrichy3234 2y ago
  GDPR allows you to get your personal identifiable information removed, not content. And GDPR is an eu thing not a usa thing.
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  It's annoying that people treat GDPR like a magic word that lets them do whatever they want. It only covers personal data -- as in, your name, address, phone number, email, any other identifiable information, etc.
gruez 2y ago
Does GDPR apply to non-personal data that you've generated?
- Qem 2y ago
  Stylometric analysis can be used to link texts you write to your identity, even if written anonymously. These are grounds to claim the texts you write are inherently personal. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry

ChrisLTD 2y ago

It’s sad to see the death pangs of one of the most useful resources of my career.

golol 2y ago
Stackoverflow is and will be fine, what are you basing this panic on?
- tempest_ 2y ago
  Many many people use Copilot / ChatGPT in place of stack overflow for all the obvious reasons.
  - golol 2y ago
    Yes and that either works perfectly and Stackoverflow is not needed, or it doesn’t work and we keep using Stackoverflow. In reality it is of course a mix of the two. My point is, we’re not just going to sit around and twiddle our thumbs if there is a dramatic drop in the accessibility of Q&A. We’ll do something! Just like when Stackoverflow was created.
- rrwo 2y ago
  Stack Overflow has been less useful for several years before OpenAI. I find for web technologies it's less useful because the technologies keep change, and what was a good answer in 2010 is not now. To answer questions I find it more useful to consult a primary source, such as the documentation on a some software's website, or a forum dedicated to that software. On SO I often get no replies, or unhelpful and often toxic comments along the lines of "Technology X is bad, use Y instead". Or I often get people who answer the question as if they show applying for a job at Google. No, I just need help with some software to process a few thousand rows and send a summary once a month by email. I'm not trying to process petabytes of data with a response time of <1ms.

jjgreen 2y ago

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. How about repeatedly changing just a few characters, corrupting the post over a period of time? (Entrepreneurs: you can have "SO post gradual corruption as a service" for free, you're welcome)

surfingdino 2y ago
So you propose intentional answer rot?
- jjgreen 2y ago
  Let's call it "composting"
gruez 2y ago
1. What about all the humans reading your answers? I get you're on a crusade against AI, but it kinda sucks that you're potentially sabotaging student/junior programmers in the process. 2. This seems easily detectable, by checking edit volumes of a given user and/or post. Even 1 edit per month is probably going to be suspect compared to how infrequently posts actually get edited.
- jjgreen 2y ago
  No crusade, just offering constructive suggestions to the OP. Detectable, maybe -- month one, a few homonyms which could be spelling corrections: been -> bean etc, month two, (near-) synonyms: bean -> lentil ... throw in a few UFT8 homglyphs to add noise. Unlikely that that sort of corruption would be obvious to a machine, then manual checking is needed, and do they have the manpower for that?
  - tivert 2y ago
    It's also a programming website, so that kind of thing would probably be even better targeted at code examples and keywords (e.g. change a function name to something subtly inappropriate). That would have the added value of helping to make the derivative AI suggest errors, making it even less useful. Also one could also use a "masking" edit. Make the defacing change then another more innocuous one. > throw in a few [UTF8] homglyphs to add noise That seems like it could be defeated by a pretty straightforward normalization task. Either just a straight mapping or a mapping that's applied contextually (e.g. replace an omicron with an o, but only when the adjacent characters are ASCII).

arp242 2y ago

Preventing people from deleting all their answers has long been the policy; this is nothing new. And before anyone brings it up: GDPR does not mean "every single bit of information I ever wrote can be deleted whenever I want". Not on HN, and certainly not on Stack Overflow where you agreed to have everything under the CC license. It's painful how badly some people understand the GDPR.

1f60c 2y ago
According to OSNews' quote of the source, it's not even a permanent ban (as the title on HN implies), but a 7-day ban. https://www.osnews.com/story/139601/stack-overflow-signs-deal-with-openai-bans-users-trying-to-alter-answers/ https://www.osnews.com/story/139601/stack-overflow-signs-dea...
- arp242 2y ago
  You need to try very very hard to get a permanent ban on Stack Overflow. And even most "permanent" bans are only for 10 years. There are some exceptions, but it's rare and only after persistent serious long-term abuse and all the shorter bans didn't work.
consp 2y ago
> Not on HN From the privacy policy: > you represent and warrant that you own all right, title and interest in and to such User Content, including, without limitation, all copyrights and rights of publicity contained therein So I'm pressing X for doubt, but someone with legal knowledge may enlighten me otherwise.
- arp242 2y ago
  Public comments are not personal data, either in the "common sense" meaning or as defined by the GDPR. Maybe purely legally you can revoke permission for HN to publish your comments, I'm not sure about that, but that's a completely different copyright thing unrelated to GDPR.
  - 2y ago

zdimension 2y ago

Title is a little misleading. Regardless of one's opinion on StackOverflow's partnership with OpenAI, editing existing questions & answers to replace them with protest messages fully fits their rules' definition of defacing. Editing the answers through SO's tools is not the right way to protest (since it's trivial for them to suspend you because you're clearly violating their rules); the GDPR is. Making a GDPR deletion request is quite easy.

dartos 2y ago
I don’t think questions and answers that were willingly published count as GDPR data. SO probably retains rights to them.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago
  And not even just SO. They were licensed to you, me and everyone else under Creative Commons, the OP can't just revoke the license.
- arp242 2y ago
  User content is explicitly licensed under CC-BY-SA. Claiming GDPR on it is just as silly as claiming GDPR because someone forked your GPL project in a way you didn't like.
viraptor 2y ago
It's still a good protest if you're not covered by GDPR. As long as you don't care about the account that is - I suspect you're going to be banned after a few times. But there's only so many people able to review changes/flags. Enough people could totally DoS the review system and force some changes.
- Richyrichy3234 2y ago
  Its very easy. No one is editing their posts constantly and with high change. Take your backups (you have anyway), diff the content, allow only minor changes and a max edit limit of x, restore the content if those criteria are not met. Sure it costs a week or a month to add this feature to the platform but data will not be lost. Nonetheless, SO is not the only ones having an archive of SO

wodenokoto 2y ago

> It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. Let's be honest, your answers on StackOverflow was never _not_ used for profit.

duxup 2y ago
Yeah I’m unsure what they thought the situation with Stack Overflow was…

simonw 2y ago

Here's a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity: https://mastodon.social/@ben@m.benui.ca https://mastodon.social/@ben@m.benui.ca

d0mine 2y ago
404
wallmountedtv 2y ago
This seems to just 404 for me? Edit: https://hachyderm.io/@ben@m.benui.ca/112396508798014598 https://hachyderm.io/@ben@m.benui.ca/112396508798014598 has it cached for me.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  The power of decentralization
- simonw 2y ago
  Yeah it worked for me the first time and doesn't work now, not sure how to fix that.
  - wallmountedtv 2y ago
    I tried another server and Hachyderm still has it available. Idk why it disappeared off Mastodon Social.
  - NicoJuicy 2y ago
    Makes this statement a bit akward, no? > Here's a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity
    - simonw 2y ago
      I'm not sure what happened, the original link worked for me at first but then it started redirecting to the site that was overwhelmed rather than serving the cached content.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dazzawazza 2y ago

It's nice to see all that effort by the many being monetized by the few so that the many can be off loaded making more money for the few. Well played, well played. Strange game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg

gruez 2y ago
>It's nice to see all that effort by the many being monetized by the few That's how the internet worked since web 2.0. Generative AI training is just another way it's being monetized.
duxup 2y ago
The many should think about who they give content to. To some extent that’s on them. I doubt they had any reasonable expectation that Stack Overflow was a charity. Also my answer about centering a Div… really isn’t worth much.
golol 2y ago
Who is harmed by this deal between Stackoverflow and OpenAI? What’s the problem with OpenAI profiting of the content on Stackoverflow? I profit of it, everyone does. The whole point is to share knowledge for anyone to profit off. There is absolutely no real issue unless one starts arguing about slippery slopes where Stackoverflow monetizes its platform and the website becomes unusable due to AI spam etc. I find these fears quite unrealistic.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  Let's say you spend days or weeks making a piece of art for a friend for their birthday. 2, 3 years later it's no longer hanging their bedroom, and you ask, and they tell you they sold it for $50k. You'd be a bit annoyed on multiple fronts....
  - gruez 2y ago
    >2, 3 years later it's no longer hanging their bedroom, and you ask, and they tell you they sold it for $50k. The analogy fails because in this case, the painting is still on their bedroom, just like how the guy's stackoverflow answer is still on stackoverflow. Moreover, when you contribute to stackoverflow, you agree that your work is licensed under a creative commons license. So it's the equivalent of giving your friend a painting, telling them "oh btw you can do whatever you want with it, as long as you attribute back to me", and then get mad that they digitized it and put it on their blog. Finally, let's be real here. This isn't a painting worth $50k. No one's comment is worth anywhere near that. It's hilarious how many of the same talking points from discussions on piracy from a decade ago has been reused in discussions about LLM training data (eg. "piracy = theft" -> "LLM training = theft")

Richyrichy3234 2y ago

This is just ignorant; Surprise your content is publicly available and used by a company for profit \o/ Srsly... your QA was used in GPT before this agreement already now SO profits from it which makes it in theory better because now SO (the platform you liked before this) is able to continue investing into it and making money / profit which motivates them to keep investing and inovating. Why tf is this a bad thing?

remram 2y ago
> public Have you never heard of copyright or licenses? Or what is your point?
- Richyrichy3234 2y ago
  Yes of course. Did you ever read the service agreement with SO? SO is not GitHub. GitHub has high motivation to protect your (c) for you, SO has not. Never has.
  - remram 2y ago
    I don't understand this new point at all. Both SO and GitHub want people to keep putting their content in there, because it's the entire value proposition of their sites. Both SO and GitHub have specific licenses for content. Where do you see this difference? GitHub already sells Copilot, trained on copyrighted user data. Where do you observe this "motivation"?

udev4096 2y ago

What did you expect from a centralized platform? They will monetize all of your content without thinking twice

gruez 2y ago
...as opposed to non-centralized platforms that certainly won't be scraped by AI companies?
- tivert 2y ago
  > ...as opposed to non-centralized platforms that certainly won't be scraped by AI companies? You could avoid the scraping by requiring login or maybe having some continuously generated AI noise requiring social context filter out that a scraper wouldn't have (e.g. a bot in a chatroom that spews garbage that everyone knows to put in their killfile).
  - gruez 2y ago
    >You could avoid the scraping by requiring login This is easily bypassed by having some sort of pattern matching sign-up script (because realistically, everyone is going to be using an off-the-shelf solution like wordpresss which you can detect and write scripts for) and paying a captcha solving farm to solve any captchas for you. Practically speaking though, having a signup wall is going to be killer for getting visits. It's already hard enough as it is to get started as an independent writer/blogger with no sign up wall. If you're going to force people to log in as well all that will do is ensure your posts are read by no one. >or maybe having some continuously generated AI noise requiring social context filter out that a scraper wouldn't have (e.g. a bot in a chatroom that spews garbage that everyone knows to put in their killfile). Similar problem to the above. Why would someone want to join your community when the first thing they see is that it has a spam problem that's seemingly unaddressed?
    - tivert 2y ago
      >> You could avoid the scraping by requiring login > This is easily bypassed by having some sort of pattern matching sign-up script I would imagine it's not that easy. At a minimum you could have captchas, and if those stop working you could always add some other friction (like a nominal payment for an account, a la Metafilter). > Similar problem to the above. Why would someone want to join your community when the first thing they see is that it has a spam problem that's seemingly unaddressed? Because they understand the reason, and there emerges some common understanding that's something you need to do to discourage scraping?

luuurker 2y ago

Regarding this title: The user didn't delete answers, they updated them to say something unrelated to the question. I understand the protest, but there's a difference between deleting and what's essentially defacing.

hypeatei 2y ago
Moreover, they still have that data juding from OPs screenshot with the diff view, lol. I don't think it would be very hard for AI to figure out that it's a garbage answer and just pull the version before edits. This problem is not a technical one; the companies already have the data.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  No, but the social problem is that StackOverflow's entire reason to exist is to provide correct answers common questions. So of course they will intervene if somebody starts ripping answers off the human facing user interface as well. The net will interpret damage as damage and route around it.
- greenbit 2y ago
  How is an AI supposed to work that out? Given the talk about how these models have a tendency to confabulate, this would seem problematic. Idk though, maybe this is now a thing?
  - gruez 2y ago
    Not prompt engineer, but can't you ask it to answer yes or no to "Are these two comments vaguely about the same thing"? I'm not sure where the confabulation can happen, aside from misclassification which can be solved by getting a human and/or more LLMs to review the decision.
    - greenbit 2y ago
      Interesting, did not know these things could be used to make assessments, judgments, categorizations, etc. Had been under the impression they just riff out text based on suggestions.

not_a_dane 2y ago

More individuals are increasingly recognizing that we are currently in a medieval era of the Internet. The content and creations we share online today are essentially not entirely our own. Many are eagerly awaiting a transformative moment akin to the French Revolution to rectify this situation.

golol 2y ago
I personally hope that nothing changes in this regard. I think it’s great if everyone can use the content that was voluntarily posted online for the whole world to see.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Speaking as someone with 100k rep on SO, I don't mind them using my answers to train the model. What I object to is when the resulting model is not then itself posted online for the whole world to see. If OpenAI actually shared the weights for GPT-4, I would consider it an ethical trade.
  - MiguelX413 2y ago
    Their name is ClosedAI
gruez 2y ago
>More individuals are increasingly recognizing that we are currently in a medieval era of the Internet. The content and creations we share online today are essentially not entirely our own. currently? Even in the geocities days, companies can presumably crawl/scrape your site to train their LLMs. The only way of preventing that is by paywalling your site, which I doubt many hobbyist bloggers are going to do.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

smeeth 2y ago

So I totally get that people are upset, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that SO was on the path towards going out of business. If they didn’t change something they would simply cease to exist. Does anyone have a better idea?

drpossum 2y ago
They're entitled to their business model. They're not entitled to that business model being successful.

wengo314 2y ago

web2.0 was about user generated content. i would say this is the so-far elusive web3.0

xyst 2y ago

Why would OpenAI even need to partner with SO? Scraping is free. Just shows how much money OpenAI has to spend when they could have got it for free.

rvnx 2y ago
Technically, search engines scraping content are doing illegal reproduction of copyrighted works, it's just tolerated by the copyright owners (but not all of them tolerate that; news websites for example).
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  It's not even clear it's illegal; generally, the legality is in the use, not the copying of the data. ... But the easiest way to shortcut all of those thorny open questions is to go through the front door with a big sack of cash and an explicit agreement on how the data will be harvested and what it will be used for.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Technically, search engines scraping content are doing illegal reproduction of copyrighted works I thought it was ruled to be fair use? eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc.
utopiah 2y ago
Do they even need scrapping? I'm not OpenAI yet still have SO copy via https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=stack_exchange https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=stack_exchange (which I use for offline trips).

rvnx 2y ago

Since the content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, the solution is to wait until OpenAI eat the content, and ask them to attribute the copyright to you when they create derivative work (e.g. OpenAI models). Seems fair, and provides back the credit to the person who prepared the answer.

gruez 2y ago
>and ask them to attribute the copyright to you when they create derivative work Whether LLM training counts as "copying" has yet to be settled in court. Absent that, it's unclear whether attribution is even required. For instance, facts aren't copyrightable, so you can theoretically incorporate facts from other works into your work without attribution.
remram 2y ago
How are you going to "ask them"?

quietbritishjim 2y ago

Any content you post on Stack Overflow is licensed (by you) as CC BY-SA [1]. Which is fantastic! Your answer can be freely (with attribution) used elsewhere. Admittedly, the main use has historically been clone websites that just add adverts with no value. But the principle is there. But if anyone has a license to use your content... Then certainly Stack Overflow do! If they want to post an old version of your question/answer that hasn't been overwritten with a message about some cause you care about, important as it may be to you, then they're free to do that. This is not news. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

rvnx 2y ago
Not just CC-SA, but CC-BY-SA, this is a big difference, they need to attribute the work to you.
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  Oops! Edited to fix.
remram 2y ago
They're free to do that with the VERY TINY requirement of attribution. And they won't even do that. I take this as the giant "F YOU" that it is.

mapcars 2y ago

Not sure exactly what this protest is for, questions and answers both published publicly and anyone can see them without an account and benefit from it. Alright, if they use it to train some AI - what is the big deal? As I understand the original posts are still accessable. Essentially users will be paying for faster search and better precision since you can do the same without payed AI.

biglyburrito 2y ago

No more answering questions on StackOverflow, then -- easy peasy.

rickydroll 2y ago

Would there be all this Sturm und Drang if the LLM models generated from stack overflow (and other) content were considered a social good and available at no cost? Or perhaps the turmoil comes from the fact that somebody else is making profits with no oversight, and it's not really about the LLM mechanism and toolchain itself.

int_19h 2y ago
I think it varies from person to person. Speaking for myself, I agree with the way you put it. If it matters, I'm in the top 0.15% of SO contributors, although most of that has been in its early years. But other people might be opposed to AI on principle, or consider it a threat to their job etc.

dsign 2y ago

At some level, I feel like the guy is an extremist with his opposition to OpenAI and AI in general. But it could be that he is on the right, that we are slowly creating a successor species, and that we are not reacting with enough force because of our cultural inertia.

HeavyStorm 2y ago

I don't get this self-entitlement... It sounds so childish. The same users erasing posts have used knowledge on SO to do their jobs, therefore profiting from it. Now SO will profit from it, and so will OpenAI, as they should. Also, answers are edotsble by other users, so you don't own them after you post them.

holsta 2y ago
The answers are licensed under CC-BY-SA. It matters.
- Vingdoloras 2y ago
  CC-BY-SA is a perpetual license, so the author can't just decide that they don't want StackOverflow to have access to the content anymore.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    The point is that OpenAI is not sharing the result of that training with us, nor even the training set. In other words, they are ignoring both "attribution" and "share-alike" parts of the license, claiming that it's not applicable because what they are doing is fair use, and so copyright is not a concern.

knoopx 2y ago

lol, I hope Mr. Altman finds my 10 year old posts relevant

maxen 2y ago

Wow,Thats unfair