5 ms·

I gave my time and expertise to StackOverflow because it was licensed CC-BY-SA

75 points by luu 2y ago

labrador 2y ago
> It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug. I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI. Just because OpenAI charges $20 a month? It takes a lot of electricity to produce results from AI. Just seems shortsighted on flimsy principle. If it were me I'd wait for the lawyers to sort out what SO and OpenAI are doing with CC-By-SA instead of making a big stand about it on the internet, but I can sort of get it I guess. Edit: I called it flimsy principle because it's not clear that CC-By-SA prevents this until the court rules
- yevlasenko 2y ago
  Also read recently that Stack Overflow business traffic is down over 50% after chat gpt release. Doesn't seem that any of the upset people think about destiny of Stack Overflow itself... which is a little sad.
  - gds44 2y ago
    Once upon a time I used to live in libraries to make any kind of progress on certain problems. Then Google arrived and my library visits reduced drastically. Yet libraries still stand. And I still head there whenever I need some peace and quite. Something like that will happen with StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Quora,Reddit and even HN.
    - niemandhier 2y ago
      The difference ist that libraries are vaults of knowledge usually operated by governments to ensure access to the public. Of all the examples you named only Wikipedia has a mission that is comparable to a library. All the others will probably perish and exist as datasets you can buy, just like some social networks of yore.
  - beardyw 2y ago
    To what extent did Stack Overflow think about destiny of Stack Overflow?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Creative Commons as a license basically says "if copyright says you need permission to do something, you can do it, subject to these conditions". If training is fair use then Creative Commons explicitly does not restrict AI training, period. If it's not fair use then the model authors have to provide proper attribution and a CC-BY-SA license declaration on their model. For billions of text posts. Good luck. With that. On the surface Creative Commons licenses are "AI-friendly" - in that they exist to opt-out of parts of copyright protection - but in practice AI goes against the spirit of Creative Commons so heavily that actually complying with it is impossible. If your attribution string requires its own search engine, maybe it's not effective attribution? For the record I don't think training is going to be fair use. The AI model you're training is usurping the market for new art/writing/etc, and there's a clear chain of provenance from the training data to the final model and specific outputs (in at least some cases, e.g. "draw a 1970s scifi robot" giving you C3PO).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - CommanderData 2y ago
    I think a explicit AI-hostile / AI non-friendly license is needed which explicitly denies work being trained on. For the small minority who do not wish to feed the LLM, shortsighted maybe but I can see a group of people who are all for source available but not for AI. I imagine most licenses that are AI restrictive indirectly can potentially be circumvented. Edit: looks like there already is https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses
    - crote 2y ago
      The problem is that AI is making use of the Fair Use exception. They don't need to follow the license - fair use means they can just ignore it!
      - out-of-ideas 2y ago
        i think the bigger problem folks have is these ai tools charge a premium for data which was consumed from publicly open websites, where folks originally contributed their knowledge with the belief that others could access the information as-is (paraphrased or what have you)- without being charged a fee cost has always been an issue, from bandwidth to storage to system maint, to electricity - the bills gotta get paid somehow; its not like websites are gov funded to keep those 9's happy
- bionhoward 2y ago
  OpenAI says you can’t use the output to compete with them. That’s why everyone should cancel their blessed subscription and switch to Mistral or Groq. Same issue with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Inflection, Meta, and xAI, all are literal cowards who would learn from others without permission then forbid others from learning from them
  - jodleif 2y ago
    Really? Isn’t that sort of insane considering the corpus they train their models on?
- itsacomment 2y ago
  > I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI. They do explain that in the post: because of the missing reciprocity. They didn't do it so OpenAI could profit off other's work, but to build a community with others. It's a pretty common motivator for humans.
  - labrador 2y ago
    How does removing their code help anyone? It barely makes the tineist bit of difference to Open AI, if any that's detectable. They aren't the only one's helping with that kind of code. "But it's the principle of the thing." Ok, well if it makes you feel good but that kind of self-centeredness belies your stated desire to help people. edit: I think what bothers me is it seems like a Luddite reaction of someone who resents progress they don't approve of and want no part of it
    - jnsie 2y ago
      > How does removing their code help anyone? The same way protesting anything helps anyone. It draws attention to a problem and, if the protest is visible enough, leads to positive change.
      - Jcowell 2y ago
        I want to say that there’s a missing component that a lot of people miss when it comes to protest. Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care. The goal of protest isn’t visibility , it’s to convince a target into doing what you want, where visibility is used as a tool to embarrass the target into submission. If the target has no shame, then you can protest all you want, they won’t care. In the 1960s If the US wasn’t in a cold war and didn’t care that they were perceived as racists , The Civil Rights Movement would probably have to moved towards the Malcom X direction than Kings.
        brokenmachine 2y ago
        >Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care. Sounds like it's just that the deal has changed, so they don't like the new deal and have decided to opt out.
- yoav 2y ago
  Additionally it’s wild they think their content hadn’t already been scraped and trained on. They were fine with humans training on this data and selling their expertise to employers, but they’re not fine with a higher order way to consume their contribution and are removing it so smaller open source competitors to open ai can’t train on the same data openai trained on.
- barrysteve 2y ago
  [dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
erickj 2y ago
I don't know when it was most recently changed, but... "and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you" https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public This content isn't licensed under CC-BY-SA to stackoverflow, it carries additional riders which grant SO the legal right to sell it however they please.
- crote 2y ago
  Those are fairly cookie-cutter clauses. Imagine trying to operate a website serving user-submitted content without those rights - it can't be done. Interestingly, the one commonly-seen phrase missing here is "sublicense". IANAL, but it seems they aren't allowed to just sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps their deal with OpenAI just completely ignores this (their business hinges on training being fair use anyways) and what they are actually selling is convenient API access?
  - bionhoward 2y ago
    Isn’t this an obvious GDPR violation to say users can’t remove content? Maybe Stack Overflow is setting themselves up for a massive civil penalty in the order of many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for denying European citizens their right to remove their data from the platform
    - nonameiguess 2y ago
      I see nothing here that indicates a person has the right to have Stack Overflow answers deleted: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ First, I don't see how or why an answer would be considered "personal" data that is subject to this regulation at all. As far as I'm aware, that means data about yourself, not every piece of information about everything you have ever committed to public record. Second, Stack Overflow pretty clearly serves an informational purpose in the public interest that would be impeded if answers get deleted, which specifically makes it exempt. The same thing goes for Europeans thinking Hacker News needs to let you delete comment history. If you say more than you intended in a specific instance, giving away information that can be used to identify you, you can ask to have that deleted and they will do it. In fact, I've done that myself. If you ask to have your entire comment history deleted, they do not have to do that.
kemotep 2y ago
This whole ordeal reminds me that I actually do need to go back and clean up and edit all my stack exchange posts. Not because I want to protest but because they are bad. Even highly upvoted and accepted answers of mine are pretty poor quality, don’t give the best advice, and in some cases provide misinformation. I am very sure I instructed people on how to make Frankendebian in more than one answer. And I can’t be unique in this regard. Just scraping Stack Exchange without someone reviewing what that information actually is, is going to actively feed bad information into the model.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792

75 points by luu 2y ago

> It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug. I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI. Just because OpenAI charges $20 a month? It takes a lot of electricity to produce results from AI. Just seems shortsighted on flimsy principle. If it were me I'd wait for the lawyers to sort out what SO and OpenAI are doing with CC-By-SA instead of making a big stand about it on the internet, but I can sort of get it I guess. Edit: I called it flimsy principle because it's not clear that CC-By-SA prevents this until the court rules

yevlasenko 2y ago
Also read recently that Stack Overflow business traffic is down over 50% after chat gpt release. Doesn't seem that any of the upset people think about destiny of Stack Overflow itself... which is a little sad.
- gds44 2y ago
  Once upon a time I used to live in libraries to make any kind of progress on certain problems. Then Google arrived and my library visits reduced drastically. Yet libraries still stand. And I still head there whenever I need some peace and quite. Something like that will happen with StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Quora,Reddit and even HN.
  - niemandhier 2y ago
    The difference ist that libraries are vaults of knowledge usually operated by governments to ensure access to the public. Of all the examples you named only Wikipedia has a mission that is comparable to a library. All the others will probably perish and exist as datasets you can buy, just like some social networks of yore.
- beardyw 2y ago
  To what extent did Stack Overflow think about destiny of Stack Overflow?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 2y ago
Creative Commons as a license basically says "if copyright says you need permission to do something, you can do it, subject to these conditions". If training is fair use then Creative Commons explicitly does not restrict AI training, period. If it's not fair use then the model authors have to provide proper attribution and a CC-BY-SA license declaration on their model. For billions of text posts. Good luck. With that. On the surface Creative Commons licenses are "AI-friendly" - in that they exist to opt-out of parts of copyright protection - but in practice AI goes against the spirit of Creative Commons so heavily that actually complying with it is impossible. If your attribution string requires its own search engine, maybe it's not effective attribution? For the record I don't think training is going to be fair use. The AI model you're training is usurping the market for new art/writing/etc, and there's a clear chain of provenance from the training data to the final model and specific outputs (in at least some cases, e.g. "draw a 1970s scifi robot" giving you C3PO).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CommanderData 2y ago
  I think a explicit AI-hostile / AI non-friendly license is needed which explicitly denies work being trained on. For the small minority who do not wish to feed the LLM, shortsighted maybe but I can see a group of people who are all for source available but not for AI. I imagine most licenses that are AI restrictive indirectly can potentially be circumvented. Edit: looks like there already is https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses
  - crote 2y ago
    The problem is that AI is making use of the Fair Use exception. They don't need to follow the license - fair use means they can just ignore it!
    - out-of-ideas 2y ago
      i think the bigger problem folks have is these ai tools charge a premium for data which was consumed from publicly open websites, where folks originally contributed their knowledge with the belief that others could access the information as-is (paraphrased or what have you)- without being charged a fee cost has always been an issue, from bandwidth to storage to system maint, to electricity - the bills gotta get paid somehow; its not like websites are gov funded to keep those 9's happy
bionhoward 2y ago
OpenAI says you can’t use the output to compete with them. That’s why everyone should cancel their blessed subscription and switch to Mistral or Groq. Same issue with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Inflection, Meta, and xAI, all are literal cowards who would learn from others without permission then forbid others from learning from them
- jodleif 2y ago
  Really? Isn’t that sort of insane considering the corpus they train their models on?
itsacomment 2y ago
> I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI. They do explain that in the post: because of the missing reciprocity. They didn't do it so OpenAI could profit off other's work, but to build a community with others. It's a pretty common motivator for humans.
- labrador 2y ago
  How does removing their code help anyone? It barely makes the tineist bit of difference to Open AI, if any that's detectable. They aren't the only one's helping with that kind of code. "But it's the principle of the thing." Ok, well if it makes you feel good but that kind of self-centeredness belies your stated desire to help people. edit: I think what bothers me is it seems like a Luddite reaction of someone who resents progress they don't approve of and want no part of it
  - jnsie 2y ago
    > How does removing their code help anyone? The same way protesting anything helps anyone. It draws attention to a problem and, if the protest is visible enough, leads to positive change.
    - Jcowell 2y ago
      I want to say that there’s a missing component that a lot of people miss when it comes to protest. Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care. The goal of protest isn’t visibility , it’s to convince a target into doing what you want, where visibility is used as a tool to embarrass the target into submission. If the target has no shame, then you can protest all you want, they won’t care. In the 1960s If the US wasn’t in a cold war and didn’t care that they were perceived as racists , The Civil Rights Movement would probably have to moved towards the Malcom X direction than Kings.
      - brokenmachine 2y ago
        >Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care. Sounds like it's just that the deal has changed, so they don't like the new deal and have decided to opt out.
yoav 2y ago
Additionally it’s wild they think their content hadn’t already been scraped and trained on. They were fine with humans training on this data and selling their expertise to employers, but they’re not fine with a higher order way to consume their contribution and are removing it so smaller open source competitors to open ai can’t train on the same data openai trained on.
barrysteve 2y ago
[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

erickj 2y ago

I don't know when it was most recently changed, but... "and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you" https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public This content isn't licensed under CC-BY-SA to stackoverflow, it carries additional riders which grant SO the legal right to sell it however they please.

crote 2y ago
Those are fairly cookie-cutter clauses. Imagine trying to operate a website serving user-submitted content without those rights - it can't be done. Interestingly, the one commonly-seen phrase missing here is "sublicense". IANAL, but it seems they aren't allowed to just sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps their deal with OpenAI just completely ignores this (their business hinges on training being fair use anyways) and what they are actually selling is convenient API access?
- bionhoward 2y ago
  Isn’t this an obvious GDPR violation to say users can’t remove content? Maybe Stack Overflow is setting themselves up for a massive civil penalty in the order of many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for denying European citizens their right to remove their data from the platform
  - nonameiguess 2y ago
    I see nothing here that indicates a person has the right to have Stack Overflow answers deleted: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/ First, I don't see how or why an answer would be considered "personal" data that is subject to this regulation at all. As far as I'm aware, that means data about yourself, not every piece of information about everything you have ever committed to public record. Second, Stack Overflow pretty clearly serves an informational purpose in the public interest that would be impeded if answers get deleted, which specifically makes it exempt. The same thing goes for Europeans thinking Hacker News needs to let you delete comment history. If you say more than you intended in a specific instance, giving away information that can be used to identify you, you can ask to have that deleted and they will do it. In fact, I've done that myself. If you ask to have your entire comment history deleted, they do not have to do that.

kemotep 2y ago

This whole ordeal reminds me that I actually do need to go back and clean up and edit all my stack exchange posts. Not because I want to protest but because they are bad. Even highly upvoted and accepted answers of mine are pretty poor quality, don’t give the best advice, and in some cases provide misinformation. I am very sure I instructed people on how to make Frankendebian in more than one answer. And I can’t be unique in this regard. Just scraping Stack Exchange without someone reviewing what that information actually is, is going to actively feed bad information into the model.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027 Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792