On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI introduced a brand new API partnership that may combine Stack Overflow’s technical content material with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. The deal has sparked controversy amongst Stack Overflow’s consumer neighborhood, with many expressing anger and protest over the usage of their contributed content material to assist and prepare AI fashions.
“I hate this. I am simply going to delete/deface my solutions one after the other,” wrote one consumer on sister web site Stack Change. “I do not care if that is towards your foolish insurance policies, as a result of as this announcement exhibits, your insurance policies can change at a whim with out prior session of your stakeholders. You do not care about your customers, I do not care about you.”
Stack Overflow is a well-liked question-and-answer web site for software program builders that permits customers to ask and reply technical questions associated to coding. The location has a big neighborhood of builders who contribute information and experience to assist others resolve programming issues. Over the previous decade, Stack Overflow has turn into a closely utilized useful resource for a lot of builders in search of options to widespread coding challenges.
Underneath the introduced partnership, OpenAI will make the most of Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI product to enhance its AI fashions utilizing content material from the Stack Overflow neighborhood—formally incorporating data that many imagine it had beforehand scraped with no license. OpenAI can even “floor validated technical information from Stack Overflow instantly into ChatGPT, giving customers easy accessibility to trusted, attributed, correct, and extremely technical information and code backed by the tens of millions of builders which have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years,” in line with Stack Overflow.
In return, OpenAI plans to offer attribution to the Stack Overflow neighborhood inside ChatGPT, however how the corporate will try this precisely is unclear. Stack Overflow can even use OpenAI know-how in its growth of OverflowAI, an AI mannequin introduced in July 2023 that makes use of an LLM to offer solutions to developer questions.
Whereas the businesses tout the collaboration’s advantages, many Stack Overflow customers have expressed their displeasure with the deal. That is very true contemplating that till very not too long ago, Stack Overflow appeared to take a damaging stance towards generative AI normally, banning solutions written utilizing ChatGPT. It was additionally extensively reported final yr that ChatGPT’s recognition had severely lowered Stack Overflow’s visitors, although the corporate appeared to later refute that, claiming defective evaluation by outsiders.
Because the announcement, some customers have tried to change or delete their Stack Overflow posts in protest, arguing that the transfer steals the labor of those that contributed to the platform with no option to decide out. In retaliation, Stack Overflow employees have reportedly been banning these customers whereas erasing or reverting the protest posts. On Monday, a Stack Overflow consumer named Ben took to Mastodon to share his expertise of getting suspended after posting a protest message:
Stack Overflow moderators have said that when posts are made, they turn into “a part of the collective efforts” of different contributors and may solely be eliminated beneath extraordinary circumstances, in line with The Verge. Stack Overflow’s phrases of service additionally state that customers can’t revoke permission for Stack Overflow to make use of their contributed content material.
Whereas Stack Overflow owns consumer posts, the positioning makes use of a Artistic Commons 4.0 license that requires attribution. We’ll see if the ChatGPT integrations, which haven’t rolled out but, will honor that license to the satisfaction of disgruntled Stack Overflow customers. For now, the battle continues.
This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.
