The claim I've heard is that you're essentially feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system that can be used to generate cash for whatever corporation owns that system (i.e. ChatGPT from OpenAI). I think it's pointless to redact content for this purpose as well but clearly some people have strong takes against AI training.

It's funny, since Stack Overflow has done EXACTLY this since day one (i.e. generate cash, with user knowledge provided for free).

The only difference is SO uses community, gamification & reputation facades, to convince users to participate for free.

With OpenAI its simply a blackbox, no credit is given.

So I guess the lesson is people are willing to participate and share things for free, as long as they're given credit, community standing or something along those lines.

For me it is less about credit and more about access. Stack overflow is public and freely available - I’ll give answers for the benefit of the community. ChatGPT is a product, it’s locked behind accounts and limited unless you’re paying.

They changed the deal on their end? I’ll delete my posts.

But your answers will still be available on SO, unless you remove them. Your answers were free and publicly available until you removed them. Making them also available to paying customers of chat-gpt does not change that at all.

In fact, chat gpt will probably still be able to answer those questions, so you removing your answers actually only removes them from the public, thus forcing people to use a paid product instead.

You had one goal, and your actions achieved the opposite.

Siuan Sanche's law of unintended consequences ought to be taught in primary school. Unfortunately it isn't.

That's a completely silly reply. SO didn't lock me out of the content I created there and charge me $20/mo to re-use it.

> The claim I've heard is that you're essentially feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system that can be used to generate cash for whatever corporation owns that system

Which is exactly how Stack Overflow has operated from day 1: You feed your knowledge into a system owned by someone else.

Also, it’s ridiculous to think that the answers haven’t already been scraped and cataloged every which way for AI training purposes.

The only people who suffer at this point are the people trying to use Stack Overflow. Deleting posts now is an own goal. People will see the information missing from Stack Overflow and switch to asking ChatGPT.

That was always the situation.

The difference between Stack Overflow and (one predecessor eg) Experts Exchange was that SO explicitly weren't making people pay to access that knowledge.

It was to make the internet better. And it did. I've learned a lot through SO sites and if the votes are to be believed, I've made the internet better for tens of thousands of people.

I don't know what AI having access to my content does but I don't think it changes the sums. I answer things, people benefit, SO makes money somehow.

> you're essentially feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system that can be used to generate cash for whatever corporation owns that system

Ive been contemplating this as well. There's a big difference between that quote and this quote:

> you're essentially feeding your own knowledge for free into an open system (the web) that can be used to generate cash for whatever corporation or person best utilizes that system

This feels more akin to a company mirroring stackoverflow and passing it off as its own, which I would object to.

But that was also always allowed under Stack Overflow’s terms. That’s why there are so many Stack Overflow clones.

It ironic that Stack Overflow went with very open and permissive licenses, which have normally been very popular with the community, yet people are outraged when the data is actually being used openly.

Aren't people already feeding knowledge into stack overflow for free which is a propriety system used to generate cash?

At least before the answers would benefit the whole community, fulfilling the spirit of CC licensing. Once it's fed to a LLM, it's essentially a form of laundering, as it's dubious the output of the models will also be free under CC. The "open" in OpenAI is effectively fake advertising. It's a proprietary enterprise misleading people by pretending open something.

It still does tho. I don't see why "whole community" cannot include open-ai? I mean, I've used knowledge gleaned from SO for the benefit of many large corporations who employed me in the past, that's not new.

"The Whole community" and open-ai are not mutually exclusive, despite what you may feel about it.

Because then open-ai won't honor the licence, once content goes through the LLM information laundering machine.

Yeah, but you get points and badges for feeding it free knowledge, they get the cash, go figure. It's the perfect pre-NFT grift.

>> feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system

Isn't that exactly what stackoverflow was?

I think people feel differently about contributing to SO or wikipedia or even quora than they would labelling CIFAR images for instance. Maybe it's a distinction without a difference but people don't usually contribute to things like stack overflow with the objective of training an AI model.

It is an odd stance as their efforts still help others, though a different company benefits financially.

I don't find anything odd about it.

There is no (reliable) attribution.

Their efforts can be used to create a silo of information that others are required to pay for (e.g. when SO shuts down, is inaccessible, or otherwise made non-functional).

Their effort might be used to create completely wrong or even harmful content while only using the training material to learn to convince people to believe the AI output.

Yes, this was all possible before, without LLMs, done by humans (or machine translation for example).

But not at this scale. SO and the comments there were still still the authoritative source, and written by humans (without the need for any proof...)

But there is growing cohort of people who want to use AI as a knowledge blackbox, search engine, encyclopedia, even as an authoritative source.

And with it comes the intent to cleanse this "knowledge" of any individual authorship or traceable source.

It is not an odd stance to oppose this, even if the concrete actions expressing this stance might be futile in this particular case.

Bur what happens after a long time, when most of the content on the internet is AI generated and thus knowledge is limited to what the AI knows?

It might improve productivity in the short term but when we start experiencing the long term effects, it might be too late to go back.

Seems like a very unlikely scenario. And as far as doomsday scenarios go, this is fairly benign.

If people getting stupid is the worst possible outcome, AI is a lot safer than I thought, and I was already on board

> This might be a controversial opinion, but to me it seems kinda petty to remove your answers from SO to stop open-ai from improving their models.

It’s reminiscent of Reddit moderators trying to shut down their subreddits in protest recently.

At the time they thought they were doing what everybody wanted, forcing Reddit executives to bend to their will, and taking control of the platform.

In reality, the only people who were inconvenienced were the users who couldn’t get info they needed for a few weeks. The vast majority of people didn’t care about the issue because they didn’t use 3rd party clients (especially those who were casual users, unlike the power mods). A few months later the protests are all but forgotten and the sentiment has shifted so far that Reddit mods are viewed as the villains most of the time.

Six months from now, I bet this protest will also be forgotten. When people click on Google links to Stack Overflow and find the key answer missing, the villain will be the SO user who threw a tantrum and deleted their post, with the original drama being long forgotten.

Personally, I'm kinda there already. Petty users removing answers out of spite are the villains. Doing stuff out of spite usually makes you the villain, and this is not an exception to that.

> It will either improve productivity

This is only a good thing if you benefit from overall increases in productivity. Most of us don't benefit at an individual level

The general population has been receiving very diminishing returns from widespread increases in productivity, the ownership class has been capturing a majority of the benefit for far too long

Until you can convince me that this will be fixed, I don't see why I should be embracing anything that "improves productivity"

Following this logic, how do you feel about automated tests? Without those, there'd be a much larger market for manual testers then there is currently..

I'm just confused about this standpoint, you seem to be opposed to actually delivering value to your employer? Sounds like you have a bad boss or something, maybe switch jobs? Or heck, create your own company if you want a bigger piece of the cake.

I'm probably missing something about your philosophy, because from where I'm standing, it kinda seems like you're saying that because you have learned programming, you're not only entitled to free money, but you also want an equal share to those who have both put in work and taken on risk to create the company you work for?

Which all kinda sounds like what you actually want is UBI, but only for you and your friends (who have higher education).

What am I missing?

> Following this logic, how do you feel about automated tests? Without those, there'd be a much larger market for manual testers then there is currently..

This is a great example

With automated tests, Manual QA positions are cut. Now the responsibility to write those tests falls on developers. Sometimes, rarely, there are automation QA people, but most places the tests are written by the devs in my experience

So the company is saving money on a bunch of salaries, the company captures the increased productivity that automated tests offer, executives get bigger bonuses, the investors get a nice bump, the individuals who now have extra responsibility get nothing

Maybe the overall developer market gets a higher salary, eventually, if you believe in the trickle down effect

> but you also want an equal share to those who have both put in work and taken on risk to create the company you work for

I don't expect to earn an equal share, but I do expect to benefit when the company does. This is more and more rare

> Which all kinda sounds like what you actually want is UBI, but only for you and your friends

You could not be further from the truth. People work harder for a smaller share every day. I just want that share to start growing, or at least stop shrinking.

I suppose yeah, failing that then I want to not to have to work as hard. I want some benefit from all of this so called productivity, instead of all of that going to rich people who lecture me about how much "risk" they take gambling some percent of their net worth that is more than I have made in my lifetime

So I actually agree with you on the social issues, but I really don't think targeting automation is the way forward.

If we want to work less, we need to automate more to make that even theoretically possible. The social situation of just a few people benefiting is orthogonal to the technology being used.

Which is why targeting specific tech in a fight for social justice is misguided, ineffective and probably even contraproductive.

It seems they are unhappy about OpenAI as a single company entity getting all that power. It doesn't seem clear enough to them that OpenAI wouldn't just snowball leaving others aside.

Yeah that's why, and maybe you are referring to this, lot of people like Universal Basic Income.

However the realistic issue is that looking at the last decades wealth doesn't spread evenly. The Internet has helped created huge almost global online monopolies (google, amazon etc) at an unprecedented rate, instead of spreading the wealth evenly.

So AI will most likely have a similar trajectory, the productivity gains will be monopolised. And we don't have a way of distributing wealth after the fact in Western Capatalism (maybe rightly so), so this is why people are afraid.