Stack Overflow Community Is Not Happy with the OpenAI Deal

https://favtutor.com/articles/stack-overflow-community-not-happy-openai/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

75 56 2 years ago

favtutor.com

wouldbecouldbe2• 2 years ago

I highly doubt if deleting posts will matter, stackoverflow most likely still serve them to OpenAI would be my guess.

richardw• 2 years ago

Yup. OpenAI will have the answers and humans won’t except through OpenAI.

williamcotton4• 2 years ago

Especially if enough people maliciously pollute the commons in support of their political ideology.

asadotzler2• 2 years ago

As long as SO feels some pain, I'm good with it. Reward good behavior, punish bad. It's not a difficult concept. OpenAI may get what it wants, but SO will also pay for engaging with them in the first place.

amarant7• 2 years ago

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.

Honestly I don't quite understand all reluctance around AI. It will either improve productivity, or it will be irrelevant. If it doesn't provide quality, it will be outcompeted.

The only consistent argument I can see against AI requires us to view employment as a social welfare program, but if that's the case, why aren't we considering an actual social welfare program?

salil999• 2 years ago

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.

osigurdson2• 2 years ago

> feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system

Isn't that exactly what stackoverflow was?

roygbiv2• 2 years ago

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

arcbyte• 2 years ago

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

drubio2• 2 years ago

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.

Aurornis4• 2 years ago

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.

oliwarner• 2 years ago

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.

cosmical65• 2 years ago

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.

amarant7• 2 years ago

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

mewpmewp2• 2 years ago

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.

Aurornis4• 2 years ago

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.

amarant7• 2 years ago

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.

bluefirebrand2• 2 years ago

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"

amarant7• 2 years ago

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?

wouldbecouldbe2• 2 years ago

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.

ryandvm• 2 years ago

Tough situation. The amount of time I spend on Stack Overflow has probably dropped by 90% since I've started paying for ChatGPT4. Clearly it's only capable of what it is because of the massive amount of data like Stack Overflow that is was trained on.

rabbits773• 2 years ago

I have been unimpressed with ChatGPT4's ability to generate code for problems of even medium complexity. Even if given partial or complete code from another language and told to translate it!

If we're seeing a heavy drop in StackOverflow usage then my guess is that Stack Overflow was getting most traffic from some very basic queries and ChatGPT is eating that base out from under them. Better for StackOverflow that they partner with OpenAI and focus on serving the higher end that they have left.

williamcotton4• 2 years ago

Does this interaction seem like low complexity?

https://chatgpt.com/share/e92bf633-4815-45bc-8ae9-9068fe257d...

[EDIT: pasted in wrong link]

There is basically no information out there on how to write error tolerant parsers for language servers. My entire knowledge before starting work on this was someone giving me a three sentence explanation on the F# Discord for an approach using an intermediary AST doing a tolerant first pass.

The key with handling medium and large complexity tasks with an LLM is to break it up into less complex tasks.

First, I showed an example of a very simple parser, parsing floats between brackets and asked for a response that parsed just strings between brackets, then I asked:

I'm working on a language server for a custom parser. What I really want to do is make sure that only floats are between brackets, but since I want to return multiple error messages at a time for the developer I figure I need to loosely check for a string first, build the AST, and then parse each node for a float. Does this seem correct?

I get a response of some of the code and then specifically ask for this case:

can you show the complete code, where I can give "[1.23][notAFloat]" as input and get back the validatedAST?

There's an error in the parser so I paste in the logged message. It corrects the error, so I then ask:

now, instead of just "Error", can we also get the line and char numbers where the error occured?

There's some more back and forth but in just a few iterations I've got what amounts to a tutorial on using FParsec to create error tolerant parsers with line and column reporting ready for integration with the language server protocol.

If anyone would like to point me in the direction of such a tutorial that already exists I would very much appreciate it!

rabbits773• 2 years ago

"However, we must not forget that AI needs to learn as well from vast sources."

Well, that's actually the problem. This current wave of AI is not "learning" anything really. An AI with any sort of generalizable reasoning ability would just need basic sources on programming syntax and semantics and figure the rest out on its own. Here, instead, we see the need to effectively memorize variations of the same thing, say, answers to related programming questions, so that they can be part of a intelligent sounding response.

I was dubious at the value of GenAI as a search tool at first, but now see that it's actually well suited for the role. These massive models are largely storing information in a compressed form and are great at retrieving and doing basic rewrites. The next evolution in Expert Systems I suppose, although lacking strong reasoning.

flatline• 2 years ago

An AI with any sort of generalizable reasoning ability would just need basic sources

That is a completely unsupportable assertion.

NateEag• 2 years ago

I mean...

Humans do this.

Not perfectly, no, but we do.

As the only general intelligences we know of so far, I'd say it's support for the assertion that an AI with general reasoning abilities wouldn't need SO or other examples to figure out how to do specific tasks.

rabbits773• 2 years ago

No, it's the very definition of being able to generalize.

Maxatar2• 2 years ago

Exactly, imagine thinking you can learn how to program Java or C just from being handed the language specification, or even learn how to play chess just by being told the rules of the game.

Humans don't learn anything of substance just from being told the strict rules, we also learn from a wealth of examples expressed through a variety of means some of which is formal, some poetic, some even comedic.

Heck, we wouldn't even need Stack Overflow to begin with if we could learn things just from basic sources.

dsabanin• 2 years ago

When was Stack Overflow community ever happy?

jmclnx2• 2 years ago

Stack Overflow has recently banned users who have tried to delete their programming source codes to prevent it from being used by OpenAI have been either banned or suspended by the site moderators.

Looks like a Class Action Suite in the making by banning users doing what was already allowed.

williamcotton4• 2 years ago

What is the complaint in this suit you're hypothesizing? How would damages be computed?

jmclnx2• 2 years ago

Lawyers like to sue, so I am sure some layers are looking. Also, deleting right now is allowed on all social apps.

roshin• 2 years ago

I wonder if there could be a way to label my data as gpl. when I answer a SO question, I do so because I want to help a random person. If a person wants to make an AI model from my answers, I'm also okay with that. But if they hoard my data and build a walled garden from my data, I'm no longer happy with that. If openai was actually open, that probably would annoy less people.

Aurornis4• 2 years ago

I wonder if there could be a way to label my data as gpl.

You can claim whatever you want, but by posting on the site you’ve given them a license as well. It’s a condition of using the website.

You’re free to license your content separately and post it on your own website, but anything you post on Stack Overflow goes under their rules.

luis02lopez• 2 years ago

Well, forget about new answers.

xucian• 2 years ago

I guess it was inevitable. I feel whatever decision they'd make, even canceling the deal, it can't get better. the ship has sailed

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Lots more discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792

kthejoker2• 2 years ago

One theory related to the invention of the Jacquard loom by Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801. The Jacquard loom uses punch cards to automate the raising and lowering of warp threads, allowing one to achieve many more sheds than a human weaver could ever grapple with. This invention, however, put many textile workers out of a job. The theory is that these employees threw their wooden clogs (the French word for these clogs is “sabots”) into the delicate machinery to wreak havoc.

"The Origin of the Word Sabotage" ( https://handwovenmagazine.com/origin-of-the-word-sabotage/ )

Stack Overflow Community Is Not Happy with the OpenAI Deal

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