Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT
Stack Overflow is overflowing with salt.
This is similar to when I heard reddit was doing the API lockdown, I wrote an automation bot over the weekend that self-destructed my subreddit and the entire post history. The bot also automatically downloaded and archived all of the content on my local machine.
It was annoying because at first I couldn't get access to older posts since at the time reddit had changed their API to only show the first X posts (100 or 1,000 or whatever). So I told my bot to delete the posts as it archived them so as I deleted content, reddit had no choice but to populate the page with the older posts.
And that's how I archived my subreddit. Reddit banned me two days later for automation, lol. I did not break any of the reddit or reddit api ToS during this process but I guess I upset someone.
I don't think I've been banned, but I did a similar thing. I requested all my data from Reddit, then used that list of comment/post IDs to mass-edit them. I think I'm in the clear because I used the official third party API, with an official "app." If you used the private API or instrumented this via the browser, that may be why you were banned.
Anyway, if you or someone else wants their full history, Reddit will give it to you via a data export request.
Unfortunately they still have everything. It's good for the "human" visibility (lack of) but they have the data still
Oh I know, I just wanted a copy too.
Deleting posts from the user PoV was the only way I could come up with to force the API to show them to me.
We can’t even communicate with out being leeched upon. Fuck this is grim
I feel like this content craze is going to evaporate soon because all the new content from here forward is sure to be polluted by LLM output already. AI is fast becoming a snake eating its own tail.
That reminds me. I should go update my licenses to spit in the face of AI training companies.
Stack Overflow just earned a place under Reddit in the hosts block list.
It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you
As if it didn't happen already
I think people would have less issues with AI training if it was non-profit and for the common good. And there are open source AI projects, many in fact. But yeah, these deals by companies like this are sleazy.
StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*
Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*
StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can't do that*
Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.
That SA part needs to be tested in court against the AI models themselves
A lot of this shittiness would probably go away if there was a risk that ingesting certain content would mean you need to release the actual model to the public.
Yeah, their assumption though is you don't? Neither attribution nor sharealike, not even full-on all-rights-reserved copyright is being respected. Anything public goes and if questions are asked it's "fair use". If the user retains CC BY-SA over their content, why is giving a bunch of money to StackOverflow entitling OpenAI to use it all under whatever terms they settled on? Boggles me.
Now, say, Reddit Terms of Service state clearly that by submitting content you are giving them the right to "a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness (...) in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world." Speaks volumes on why alternatives (like Lemmy) to these platforms matter.
AI companies are hoping for a ruling that says content generated from a model trained on content is not a derivative work. So far, the Sarah Silverman lawsuit seems to be going that way, at least; the claimants were set back because they've been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs.
If this does become jurisprudence or law in one or more countries, licenses don't mean jack. You can put the AGPL on your stuff and AI could suck it up into their model and use it for whatever they want, and you couldn't do anything about it.
The AI training sets for all common models contains copyright works like entire books, movies, and websites. Don't forget that most websites don't even have a license, and that that unlicensed work is as illegal to replicate as any book or movie normally would be, including internet comments. If AI data sets need to comply with copyright, all current AI will need to be retrained (except maybe for that image AI by that stock photo company, which is exclusively trained on licensed work).
the claimants were set back because they’ve been asked to prove the connection between AI output and their specific inputs
I mean, how do you do that for a closed-source model with secretive training data? As far as I know, OpenAI has admitted to using large amounts of copyrighted content, numberless books, newspaper material, all on the basis of fair use claims. Guess it would take a government entity actively going after them at this point.
Yep. Can't wait to overfit LLM to a lot of copyrighted work and share it to public domain. Let's see if OpenAI will get push back from copyright owner down the road.
Data Rule Numero Uno:
Garbage in, garbage out.
Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That's 80% of Stack Overflows content.
Mostly "this has been answered in another thread" and "why don't you Google it" comments in my experience.
Can’t wait until the top answer to every Google search is “just google it”
The other 20% is mostly high quality however, and I'm sure they'd filter out the heavily downvoted crud.
You say that as if the garbage gets downvoted
One time I was went on there to figure out an issue in Arduino. The answer one guy gave was "I don't know how to do this in Arduino, here's how you do this in Java". Not only the the mods prevent any other answers from being posted, I tried the guy's suggestion in Java and it didn't even work
Good luck with the deleting. It often just means
UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.There was similar things done on Reddit during the big exit. I doubt it achieved what people expected it to achieve. Even if they’re not visible externally, I’m sure they can easily access (thereby make deals to license) the data out of their backend / backup; just a matter of how hard they want to try (hint: it’s really not very hard).
Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don't think it caused them any more work.
If anything, this probably just makes reddit's/SO's partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit's/SO's backend, and other companies can't scrape it.
They are not deleting, they are editing. So the platform would have to undo those edits rather than just flipping the visibility flag.
And they are. 😞
Like AI doesn't know how to use the way back machine?
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It's not a forum; there's no such thing as "your posts." It's more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren't "yours" any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don't have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don't think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like "destroying it to save it."
Fine, but when coding projects undergo licensing changes that the contributors are against, the code author has to remove those contributions and replace them.
Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.
Simple answer: people vs corporations. A dev or homelabber getting help from you is very different from a company making billions just by mass shoveling your knowledge to the highest bidder.
The reason we need this as a fediverse service is that everyone can take in this knowledge and one corp doesnt have the ability to sell it. Thats what the worth comes from. Someone holding they key to it.
That's not what I mean. When you contribute content to Stack Exchange, it is licensed CC BY-SA. There are websites that scrape this content and rehost it, or at least there used to be. I've had a problem before where all the search results were unanswered Stack Overflow posts or copies of those posts on different sites. Maybe similar to Reddit they restricted access to the data so they could sell it to AI companies.
Those answers were given in good faith under the presumption that they would be read and used by another person. Not used to train something to remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place.
Currently, all answers are properly attributed. But once OpenAI will have trained and sell a “hackerman” persona, do you really think it will answer people’s questions with ”This answer was contributed by i_am_not_a_robot” or will it just sell this as its own answer?
As a tech, i'm fucking howling because 99% of answers to any given question is already bullshit that ranges from useless to dangerous.
"The machine" can't tell the difference and it's going to be considered authoratitive in its blithe stupidity. hoover up SA all you want, you're just gonna agregate it with bullishit and poison your own well anyway
Based users
This feels a little iffy to me. it rings of what happened with reddit.
This is a violation of GDPR, no?
EDIT: user created content is not directly protected under GDPR, only personally identifiable data is pertected under GDPR.
Dunno. GDPR is a Europe only thing, and isn't it only related to how your private data (like name, IP address, phone number) is cared about ?
Right, I think it only covers personal information: companies can only collect what they need to run their service, users can request to see their data etc. I don't think it applies to comments and posts.
I would certainly hope so. Stack Overflow content is Creative Commons licensed, so the argument is basically that the GDPR would take precedence over the CC license grant. It'd be scary if GDPR could be weaponized against forks of free software projects in this manner.
How does GDPR get away with not defining what a website is when referring to them directly in the law? Like what counts, only html? http? ftp? gopher?
This isn't really comparable to reddit, since users can just send a request to SO for all the content. Reddit locking down the API meant we lost access to our content.
If you get something for free, you are the product
Why delete the answer, why not edit it so that a human can see the answer but for AI its a load of nonsense?
There's no way that would work either, they can just store the full edit history and auto-curate as needed.
People did that. Stack overflow reverted the change.
If that would happen, I assume companies would just grab an older copy of the dumps from before people started editing their stuff because of the AI bullshit.
SA would ban everyone sabotaging their business plans and things would move on like normal, like what happened to Reddit.
Editing any content to reduce its quality is considered vandalism and gets reverted on SO.
So we need to up vote wrong answers only?
I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it's derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.
So what is the stack overflow replacement?
that would be great if they federated and implemented activitypub/atproto!
let's all go back to experts exchange
Expert sex change?
Does GDPR apply to stackoverflow? Since my data there probably does not identify me as a person?
You van delete your data but I don't think it magically makes derivative works disappear. Its licenses SA. This is good.
This shit scares me. It will become so easy to rewrite history from here. Just delete anything you don't like and have an ai rewrite into whatever you want. Entire threads rewritten, a company can go back and have your entire post history can be changed in ways that might be legally compromising.