Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

If this is true, then we should prepare to be shout at by chatgpt why we didnt knew already that simple error.

I got an email ban.

1609 hours logged 431 solved threads

Take all you want, it will only take a few hallucinations before no one trusts LLMs to write code or give advice

See, this is why we can't have nice things. Money fucks it up, every time. Fuck money, it's a shitty backwards idea. We can do better than this.

So they pulled a "reddit"?

Reddit/Stack/AI are the latest examples of an economic system where a few people monetize and get wealthy using the output of the very many.

First, they sent the missionaries. They built communities, facilities for the common good, and spoke of collaboration and mutual prosperity. They got so many of us to buy into their belief system as a result.

Then, they sent the conquistadors. They took what we had built under their guidance, and claimed we "weren't using it" and it was rightfully theirs to begin with.

Oh I didn't consider deleting my answers. Thanks for the good idea Barbra StackOverflow.

Letting corporations "disrupt" forums was a mistake.

Maybe we should replace Stack Overflow with another site where experts can exchange information? We can call it "Experts Exchange".

At the end of the day, this is just yet another example of how capitalism is an extractive system. Unprotected resources are used not for the benefit of all but to increase and entrench the imbalance of assets. This is why they are so keen on DRM and copyright and why they destroy the environment and social cohesion. The thing is, people want to help each other; not for profit but because we have a natural and healthy imperative to do the most good.

There is a difference between giving someone a present and then them giving it to another person, and giving someone a present and then them selling it. One is kind and helpful and the other is disgusting and produces inequality.

If you're gonna use something for free then make the product of it free too.

An idea for the fediverse and beyond: maybe we should be setting up instances with copyleft licences for all content posted to them. I actually don't mind if you wanna use my comments to make an LLM. It could be useful. But give me (and all the other people who contributed to it) the LLM for free, like we gave it to you. And let us use it for our benefit, not just yours.

Begun, the AI wars have.

Faces on T-shirts, you must print print. Fake facts into old forum comments, you must edit. Poison the data well, you must.

Messages that people post on Stack Exchange sites are literally licensed CC-BY-SA, the whole point of which is to enable them to be shared and used by anyone for any purpose. One of the purposes of such a license is to make sure knowledge is preserved by allowing everyone to make and share copies.

You really don't need anything near as complex as AI...a simple script could be configured to automatically close the issue as solved with a link to a randomly-selected unrelated issue.

The enshittification is very real and is spreading constantly. Companies will leech more from their employees and users until things start to break down. Acceleration is the only way.

primary use for AI is self destructing your website.

I despise this use of mod power in response to a protest. It's our content to be sabotaged if we want - if Stack Overlords disagree then to hell with them.

I'll add Stack Overflow to my personal ban list, just below Reddit.

And the enshittification continues...

I fully understand why they are doing this, but we are just losing a mass of really useful knowledge. What a shame...

Eventually, we will need a fediverse version of StackOverflow, Quora, etc.

Data should be socialized and machine learning algorithms should be nationalized for public use.

Why does OpenAI want 10 year old answers about using jQuery whenever anyone posts a JavaScript question, followed by aggressive policing of what is and isn't acceptable to re-ask as technology moves on?

I'm going to run out of sites at this pace.

While at the same time they forbid AI generated answers on their website, oh the turntables.

Rather than delete, modify the question so its wrong. Then the ai will hallucinate.

Reddit did almost the same and don't forget guys to delete your Reddit account

A malicious response by users would be to employ an LLM instructed to write plausibly sounding but very wrong answers to historical and current questions, then an army of users upvoting the known wrong answer while downvoting accurate ones. This would poison the data I would think.

Maybe we need a technical questions and answers siteon the fediverse!

Time to download the last dump: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

E: Seeding.

While I think the reaction of StackOverflow is not good, I don't understand the users either.

EDIT: seems like the language model won't be free, I understand then.

RIP in pieces Stack Overflow

Aren’t a lot of answers outdated on stackoverflow?

I will answer some questions with my old account using gpt 4 to poison the data.

If you want to poison SO a little at the same time providing valid answers that help users, use outlook.com email domain for new accounts. It seems to not have anti throwaway countermeasures while being accepted by SO. And it seems fitting to bash the corporate with the corporate.

If we can't delete our questions and answers, can we poison the well by uploading masses of shitty questions and answers? If they like AI we could have it help us generate them.

lol wow this is going even more poorly than I thought it would, and I thought my kneejerk reaction to the initial announcement was quite pessimistic.

Angry users claim they are enabled to delete their own content from the site through the "right to forget," a common name for a legal right most effectively codified into law through the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Among other things, the act protects the ability of the consumer to delete their own data from a website, and to have data about them removed upon request. However, Stack Overflow's Terms of Service contains a clause carving out Stack Overflow's irrevocable ownership of all content subscribers provide to the site

It reality irritates me when ToS simply state they will do against the law.

Thing just like reddit, but now in professional community

I am not deleting anything. They can have all of my poorly written misleading answers.

You can't quit, you're fired!!!!

Instead of solely deleting content, what if authors had instead moved their content/answers to something self-owned? Can SO even claim ownership legally of the content on their site? Seems iffy in my own, ignorant take.

For years, the site had a standing policy that prevented the use of generative AI in writing or rewording any questions or answers posted. Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI-detection software when reviewing posts. Beginning last week, however, the company began a rapid about-face in its public policy towards AI.

I listened to an episode of The Daily on AI, and the stuff they fed into to engines included the entire Internet. They literally ran out of things to feed it. That's why YouTube created their auto-generated subtitles - literally, so that they would have more material to feed into their LLMs. I fully expect reddit to be bought out/merged within the next six months or so. They are desperate for more material to feed the machine. Everything is going to end up going to an LLM somewhere.

If i was stack overflow I would've transferred my backups to OpenAI weeks before the announcement for this very reason.

This is also assuming the LLMs weren't already fed with scraped SO data years ago.

It's a small act of rebellion but SO already has your data and they'll do whatever they want with it, including mine.

Should I be glad I only ever asked shit aroud in SO?

Weren't all the answers already trained on ChatGPT last year?

How do I code a Rust CMS?

Closed. This question has been answered in a previous post. It is not currently accepting answers.

great much helpful wow

They seem to only be watching the questions right now. You’re automatically prevented from deleting an accepted answer, but if you answered your own question (maybe because SO was useless for certain niche questions a decade ago so you kept digging and found your own solution), you can unaccept your answer first and then delete it.

I got a 30 day ban for “defacing” a few of my 10+ year old questions after moderators promptly reverted the edits. But they seem to have missed where I unaccepted and deleted my answers, even as they hang out in an undeletable state (showing up red for me and hidden for others).

And comments, which are a key part to properly understanding a lot of almost-correct answers, don’t seem to be afforded revision history or to have deletes noticed by moderators.

So it seems like you can still delete a bunch of your content, just not the questions. Do with that what you will.

Can we change our answers? Change your answers to garbage, don't delete them. Do it slowly.

I don't understand what anyone wins from this

Corporations are foundationally evil

And how do they not win more if we poison the entire Internet?

It's like being in a toxic relationship with kids involved

Set boundaries

Follow rules

Don't destroy the fucking fruit of your bodies just because you are angry at each other

Fuck those guys, like a lot, for taking your given data and selling

And fuck open ai for trying to make money from scientific discoveries meant for all of humanity

But what the fuck with ruining the entire Internet?

Who gets anything then?

If language models will ruin Internet why be afraid that normal human responses are available? Wut?

Maybe we should start asking questions that iterate loops billions of times. Something semi-malicious that a person would recognize but an AI wouldn't.

Nah, the training data probably doesn't quite work that way. The AI would be very unlikely to test code, just regurgitate the most likely response based on it's training sets. Instead just filling posts with random bits and pieces of unrelated code and responses might be better.

The reddit Steve method again.

This sort of thing is so self-sabotaging. The website already has your comment, and a license to use it. By deleting your stuff from the web you only ensure that the AI is definitely going to be the better resource to go to for answers.

I mean, they could just do what reddit does and restore from backup automatically lol

Were they trying to protect ChatGPT from all the bad and convoluted answers?

Frankly, the solution here isn’t vandalism, it’s setting up a competing side and copying the content over. The license of stackoverflow makes that explicitly legal. Anything else is just playing around and hoping that a company acts against its own interests, which has rarely ever worked before.

Good to know that stackoverflow will not be a trustable place to find solutuons anymore.

It will not make a difference. The internet is free and open by design. You can always scrape the internet any time. A partnership will do nothing but make it a little bit more convenient for them.

I don't think a lot of people are crying

Welp.

cOlLaBoRatiOn

Anyone care to explain why people would care that they posted to a public forum that they don't own, with content that is now further being shared for public benefit?

The argument that it's your content becomes false as soon as you shared it with the world.

Why?? Please make this make sense. Having AI to help with coding is ideal and the greatest immediate use case probably. The web is an open resource. Why die on this stupid hill instead of advocating for a privacy argument that actually matters?

Edit: Okay got it. Hinder significant human progress because a company I don't like might make some more money from something I said in public, which has been a thing literally forever. You guys really lack a lot of life skills about how the world really works huh?

We all hate AI but please don't destroy the data on stack overflow