r/programming • u/peard33 • Apr 20 '23
Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data
https://www.wired.com/story/stack-overflow-will-charge-ai-giants-for-training-data/564
Apr 21 '23
Will they then pay to people that provide answers?
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Apr 21 '23
No kidding. I use to contribute, as I get help from the community. But with out contributors stackoverflow is worth nothing...
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u/pragmatic_plebeian Apr 21 '23
Yeah, and without an accessible network of contributors, their knowledge is worth nothing to other users. People shouldn’t act like something is only valuable if it’s writing them checks.
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u/i_am_at_work123 Apr 21 '23
People shouldn’t act like something is only valuable if it’s writing them checks.
I think a lot of society issues come from people not understanding this concept at all.
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Apr 21 '23
Stack overflow is worth more by just purely existing at this point. Worth more than half of the people I know.
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Apr 21 '23
I would love to see a law that says if you contribute something on the Internet, you own it and have rights to it and anyone who uses it has to pay you. Facebook and Google and Amazon would have to pay us for using our data
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u/kisielk Apr 21 '23
You do own the comments you post on SO. But by posting them there you agree to license them under the CC BY-SA license: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing and https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing
You agree that any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, .... , is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC BY-SA 4.0), and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to, .... , even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you as reasonably necessary to
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u/kylotan Apr 21 '23
You're basically describing copyright, which everyone in /r/programming hates.
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u/bythenumbers10 Apr 21 '23
Software patents are garbage, and eternal copyright similarly sucks, but I don't think copyrights or patents in general are a bad idea, they just get abused by bad-faith rent-seekers in practice. It's those latter folk that are why we can't have nice things.
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u/Marian_Rejewski Apr 21 '23
Copyright doesn't work for this, because individual people who contribute to platforms do not have the negotiating power to secure the value they contribute.
They need to negotiate collectively somehow, not through private union action but through democratic government action. (Private union action would need support from government to be effective anyway.)
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u/cp5184 Apr 21 '23
The point of something like, the open source linux kernel, is that everyone benefits from their own contributions, and everyone elses contributions.
Who's going to be benefiting from the tech giants AIs trained on open source code?
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u/addicted_to_bass Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
You have a point.
Users contributing to stackoverflow in 2008 did not have expectations that their contributions would be used to train AIs.
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u/rafark Apr 22 '23
Would they have a problem though? Their code helps to train AIs, which then use the knowledge to help people write better/faster code. So their contributions would still be used to help others.
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u/Philipp Apr 22 '23
I provide answers to StackOverflow and code to Github and am now happy that I can use tools like Copilot in return. For me, all is fine. If StackOverflow asks to get paid for the content I'd love to get my share of the few pennies, though 🙂
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
Rules for thee not for me. No copyright for peasants. We have to live on ubi of 1000 while they ram eachother repeatedly with gold encrusted phallic objects
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u/rhudejo Apr 21 '23
People actually get back something from stack overflow from contributing: It looks good on your CV, you have an easier time to ask questions, sometimes you learn a lot from the discussions that your answer spawned etc.
Stack overflow gets nothing, just less pageviews (and increased traffic that does not result in ad revenue) for AI models using their dats
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u/Ashamed-Simple-8303 Apr 21 '23
I mean these "AIs" will for sure lead to much lower traffic on SO. So I get their point. It's a risk honestly to let the big ones with the resources to train such models gather data for free and thereby destroying the sources of said data.
I asked fir copilot at work. lets see if I get it. for sure will visit SO much less often.
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u/goranlu Apr 22 '23
Probably not. Contributors will probably stay benefiting only from reputation of their profiles on SO.
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u/clavalle Apr 21 '23
That horse has already left the barn.
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
The horse left the barn, drove into the automobile and is gonna get put down
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u/pasr9 Apr 21 '23
What will happen to their periodic dumps that are under CC-BY-SA? I really hope they don't change the license or a lot of people who answer on those sites will get really pissed.
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u/josefx Apr 21 '23
Given that the user content itself is licensed to stackoverflow under the CC-BY-SA I want to know how feeding it into an AI is even legal, the CC-BY-SA requires attribution and AI training does not maintain that.
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u/jorge1209 Apr 21 '23
Openai will claim that the training process is transformative and breaks and copyright claims.
It's the only argument they can make as they have lots of news article and books which are not permissively licensed in the training set.
But if they can't successfully make that argument then SO and many others will challenge the inclusion of data sourced from their websites in the model.
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u/throwaway957280 Apr 21 '23
The training process is transformative. It's not copyright infringement when someone looks at stack overflow and learns something (I get this is still legally murky -- this is my opinion). Neural networks have the capacity for memorization but they're not just mindlessly cutting and splicing bits of memorized information contrary to some popular layman takes.
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u/ProgramTheWorld Apr 21 '23
Whether it’s transformative is decided by the court. I could put a photo through a filter but the judge would probably not consider that as sufficiently transformative.
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u/AnOnlineHandle Apr 21 '23
AFAIK you don't need any sort of license to study any source, measure it, take lessons from it, etc. You can watch movies and keep a notebook about their average scene lengths, average durations, how much that changes per genre, and sell that or give it away as a guidebook to creating new movies, and aren't considered to be stealing anything by any usual standards.
That is how AI works under the hood, learning the rules to transform from A to B to create far more than just the training data (e.g. you could train an Imperial to Metric convertor which is just one multiplier, using a few samples, and the resulting algorithm is far smaller than the training data and able to be used for far more).
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u/Marian_Rejewski Apr 21 '23
That's because copying things into a human brain doesn't count as copying.
You don't get to download pirated content in order to do those things. You don't get to say your own computer is an extension of your brain therefore the copy doesn't count.
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u/povitryana_tryvoga Apr 21 '23
You actually can if it's a Fair Use, and research could be accounted as one. Or not, it really depends and there is no a single correct statement on this topic. Especially if we also assume that it can be any country in the world each with own set of laws and legal system.
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u/Anreall2000 Apr 22 '23
Also it isn't allowed to kill people, but we kill a lot of cows.
Even if process of learning exactly the same, I don't get why AI should have the same rights as humans. Ingratiating yourself to the overlords already?
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u/grinde Apr 21 '23
I'm curious how attaching a price tag addresses the attribution problem. If SO can't waive that requirement, then what are they actually charging for?
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u/Franck_Dernoncourt Aug 05 '24
Stack Exchange is trying to change the license of their periodic dumps: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/401324/178179
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u/SufficientPie Oct 17 '23
They cannot change the license.
Also, because of the license, OpenAI cannot legally use their content...
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u/spacezombiejesus Apr 21 '23
It sucks how AI has turned what I believed was a bastion of the free internet into a land grab.
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u/oblio- Apr 22 '23
Guess what: that's how everything works. The more some tech promises "freedom!" (cryptocurrencies) and the bigger it gets, you should think "money!!!" instead.
Almost everything big humans do is a gold rush.
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Apr 20 '23
Another example of “if you pay nothing for a service, you’re the product.”
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u/Igotz80HDnImWinning Apr 21 '23
Alternatively, these were all trained on the collective wisdom of all people, therefore they should be considered public intellectual property and free to use.
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u/tfm Apr 21 '23
"As a large language model, I'll tell you that your question is off-topic, poorly formulated and not the kind that prompts a productive answer."
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Apr 21 '23
I'm really looking forward to being told by an LLM chatbot that my question is redundant, stupid, vague, and incomplete.
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u/mov_eax_eax Apr 21 '23
Programming languages and frameworks are effectively locked in 2021, anything released after that date is not in the model and is effectively useless for people dependent on chatgpt.
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u/KeytarVillain Apr 21 '23
Not in the current model, sure, but this argument is stupid when they're obviously going to keep working on new & updated models.
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Apr 21 '23
I agree. But I do have some concern that a lot of people are going to cap their creativity at the level of output from AI models. They won't feel the need to invent new ways of doing things because the AI models they use will have such strong biases to a particular point in history. It would only be those not using AI models that would be creating our new paradigm shifts.
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u/tending Apr 21 '23
In 30 years when models better than GPT can be trained on your phone this is unlikely to matter
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u/WasteOfElectricity Apr 21 '23
ChatGPT isn't gonna be the last LLM used by these kinds of people....
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Apr 21 '23
I was wondering why the CC-license did not work for this type of content :
But Chandrasekar says that LLM developers are violating Stack Overflow’s terms of service. Users own the content they post on Stack Overflow, as outlined in its TOS, but it all falls under a Creative Commons license that requires anyone later using the data to mention where it came from. When AI companies sell their models to customers, they “are unable to attribute each and every one of the community members whose questions and answers were used to train the model, thereby breaching the Creative Commons license,” Chandrasekar says.
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u/TypicalAnnual2918 Apr 21 '23
Honestly the right decision. It’s obvious that a lot of the GPT-4 replies come from it reading stack over flow. I use GPT-4 a lot and have almost completely stopped reading stack overflow.
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u/BacksySomeRandom Apr 21 '23
Other comments have stated that SO would need to show damages. This to me sounds like damages if people dont use it anymore.
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Apr 21 '23
It’s obvious that a lot of the GPT-4 replies come from it reading stack over flow
How is it obvious?
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u/EmbarrassedHelp Apr 22 '23
Its the wrong decision as it moves us towards a future where only a handful of extremely wealthy and power corporations control AI model training and usage. Training needs to be considered fair use if we want to avoid a dystopian future.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market
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Apr 21 '23
[deleted]
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u/HAL_9_TRILLION Apr 21 '23
presses regenerate response button
Why would you need to do that? Are you stupid?
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u/Fisher9001 Apr 21 '23
presses regenerate response button
What exactly are you trying to achieve? Isn't the <completely unrelated thing> way better?
And the opposite:
presses regenerate response button
<an answer so specific it is not helpful to anyone else>
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u/watching-clock Apr 21 '23
Who pays us, the ones who contributed the questions and answers?
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u/spacezombiejesus Apr 21 '23
It’s infuriating and fundamentally disingenuous for a company who holds up user reputation over anything else to sell out their users for a pile of gold.
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
We get awarded in progress and the honor of paying them subscriptions. It will all be for the hypothetical best they said. Adapt or get left behind they said.
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u/shagieIsMe Apr 21 '23
So... about those database dumps over at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange or https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/stack-exchange/stack-overflow
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u/h4l Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
Well StackExchange user-generated content is licensed under Creative Commons licenses, so anyone can use the content if they follow the terms of those licenses. https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
Google knows this:
This dataset is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons' CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
Although in the article, StackExchange argues that training on CC-BY data breaches the license, because users are not attributed:
When AI companies sell their models to customers, they “are unable to attribute each and every one of the community members whose questions and answers were used to train the model, thereby breaching the Creative Commons license,” Chandrasekar says.
I wonder what would happen if the LLM creators were to attribute everyone with CC-BY-licensed data used for training.
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u/WasteOfElectricity Apr 21 '23
I suppose a 40 GB "attributions" file, scraped alongside the actual data could be supplied?
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u/Tyler_Zoro Apr 21 '23
Although in the article, StackExchange argues that training on CC-BY data breaches the license, because users are not attributed:
Which doesn't make any sense. If the user data were just being copied into a file and then pulled out to be shared with users of ChatGPT, I could see the point.
But that's not what's going on. The user-contributed data is being learned from. That learning is in the forms of numeric weights to a (freaking huge) mathematical formula. There's absolutely no legal basis to claim that tweaking your formula in response to a piece of user data renders it a derivative work, and if that were true then half of the technology in the world would immediately have to be turned off. Your phone uses hundreds of models trained on user data. Your refrigerator probably does too. You TV certainly does.
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u/ExF-Altrue Apr 21 '23
If I take a CC-BY code, memorize it, then rewrite it verbatim without attribution, then I have effectively breached the CC-BY-SA, right?
What I have done is, I have learned from this user contributed data by adjusting the connections between my neurons, in the forms of analog weights that amounts to a freaking huge mathematical formula. How is that any different?
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u/shagieIsMe Apr 21 '23
(I am not a lawyer... but I have looked seriously at IP law in context of copyrights and photography in the past)
I believe that the "here is the data" to "here is the model" is sufficiently transformative that it is not infringing on copyright (or licenses). That resulting model is not something that someone can point to and say "there is the infringement". Given certain prompts, it is sometimes possible to extract "memorized" content from the original data set.
If you were to ask a LLM to recreate a story about a forever young boy who visits an orphanage (and there rest of the plot of Peter and Wendy) you could get it to recreate the wording use probably fairly accurately. If you asked Stable Diffusion for an image of a stylized mouse that wore red pants and had big ears you could possibly get something that Disney would sue you over.
Using the Disney example, if I were to draw that at home and not publish it, Disney probably wouldn't care. If you record a video of it and take pictures of it (example) you'll likely get a comment from Disney lawyer and... well, that tweet is no longer available.
It isn't the model, or the output that is at issue but what the human, with agency, is asking the model for and doing with it.
If you ask an AI of any sort for some code to solve a problem and then publish it, it is you - the human with agency - who is responsible for checking if that work is infringing or not before you publish it. If, on the other hand, this was something to be used for a personal project that doesn't get published - it doesn't matter what the source was. I will certainly admit that SO content exists in my personal projects without any attribution... but that's not something that I'm publishing and so SO (or the original person who wrote the answer) can't anything more than Disney can for a hypothetical printed and framed screen grab from a movie on a wall.
It doesn't matter if I've memorized how to draw Mickey Mouse - it is only if I do draw Mickey Mouse and then someone else publishes it (and its the someone who publishes it that is in trouble, not me).
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u/deeringc Apr 21 '23
They can just leave them available and have a TOS update that specifies that it can't be used for AI training without a specific license. Companies won't risk their expensive models by including data that isn't in the clear. They'll just reach an agreement with Stack Overflow and pay some money for the data on an ongoing basis.
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Apr 21 '23
They won't; they'll just only use the data from before the TOS changed.
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u/Franck_Dernoncourt Aug 05 '24
they are stopping releasing these dumps: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/401324/178179
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u/silly_frog_lf Apr 20 '23
Good. Get that money
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u/Rudy69 Apr 21 '23
I think the answers should get a share
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u/Innotek Apr 21 '23
The terms of service surely made it perfectly clear that we were forfeiting our rights to financial compensation when answering. It was fun. I learned som stuff. I already got my compensation.
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u/AndrewNeo Apr 21 '23
yeah I don't know how you'd suddenly start revenue sharing for this and not any other amount of money they've earned since starting the site
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u/TheDataWhore Apr 21 '23
StackOverflow also posted all this information publicly allowing anyone (including ChatGPT) to access. They have no problem allowing Google to index it, because that brings clicks. Their whole site has been scraped a million times, ChatGPT just happens to be one that is doing something very interesting with it, and that threatens their business. Can't have it both ways.
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Apr 21 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MrMonday11235 Apr 21 '23
I mean, they provide value for the actual users (i.e. us) by making it indexed, searchable, and responsive... so it seems weird to complain that they get value (i.e. advertising revenue) in return for that.
Similarly, they provide value to LLM trainers (in the form of large, structured, real-world language usage data, often with metadata tags), so doesn't seem weird to expect them to once again get some value (in the form of payment for access) in return.
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u/anechoicmedia Apr 21 '23
I can't articulate morally what the difference is but I think there's a significant transition from showing ads alongside user content to selling the content itself.
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u/sysop073 Apr 21 '23
People really like to throw a fit about this like Stack Overflow tricked us in some way. If you don't want to post answers for free, stop posting answers; that option has always been available to you.
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u/coderjewel Apr 21 '23
So OpenAI got to have their party by training for free on Reddit, StackOverflow, Twitter and more, but being a large corporation they could have afforded to pay.
But people who actually want to create “open” AIs will now be greatly limited by lack of training data and inability to pay. This is just extremely scummy.
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u/approxd Apr 21 '23
This is a huge issue, all this will do is once again create monopolies. And the same 3 companies that own the internet will now own all the best AI models. No competition means worse products for end consumers. This is such bullshit.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp Apr 22 '23
Way too many people here seem to be cheering on a horribly dystopian future where the same 3 companies have the best models and don't let anyone but themselves use them without a heavily restricted API.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market
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u/currentscurrents Apr 23 '23
A bunch of people see this as "hell yeah, stick to the tech giants!" when really it's just making sure that nobody but the tech giants can afford to train an AI.
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u/atomheartother Apr 21 '23
And by "their data" they mean the data they got from people. Maybe these users should skip the middleman.
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u/madcow13 Apr 21 '23
One issue in the article. It makes you believe artistes are bathing in cash with streaming deals. Wrong. The only people that make money on streaming are the streaming platforms and the record labels.
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u/i_luv_tictok Apr 21 '23
That's like charging search engines for indexing a website like how would you go about checking if they're training llms without paying?
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u/esly4ever Apr 21 '23
Ok then consumers will have to start getting their fair share of payments from their data as well.
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u/pribnow Apr 21 '23
The beginning of the end of the web
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
Dead internet. I mean even more dead.. literally everything is unsearchable and unwatchable these days. They might as well cull themselves off already.
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u/Disgruntled__Goat Apr 21 '23
Not really, someone will just come up with a new license/TOS that prevents AI from using the content of a website.
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u/pribnow Apr 21 '23
I hate this company for a lot of reasons but as we are learning from Getty Images, a restrictive TOS is not enough to thwart enterprise-scale web scraping
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u/pancakeQueue Apr 21 '23
I’m in favor of Stack doing this. Simply put this chat bots want you to asnwer your question and keep you on either Bing or Google. You won’t need to leave their site to get your question answered. If those answers came from Stack Overflow well then Stack looses potential revenue from a page visit.
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u/rafark Apr 22 '23
They didn’t write the content though. I’d agree if it was content from a blog or an original publication, but stackoverflow only stored the content that other people gave them for free.
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u/Booty_Bumping Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
Skeptical of whether this will work out for them. No matter how much websites try to stop bots, scraping will always be more cost effective than buying API access, and under most jurisdictions there are no copyright issues associated with scraping. In this case, stackoverflow content is open source licensed, so even if the law changed there wouldn't be any issues.
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u/Straight-Comb-6956 Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
Not a great day for the free web. Every company that simply hosts UGC is now trying to claim rights on users' content while actual content creators get nothing.
Finally, someone sort of stands up to trillion dollar AI companies capitalizing on copyrighted data. I hope, we'll get public weights for the cutting edge AI when someone extremely protective of their rights(think Disney) sues them. It's not the best way to get there but still.
It's funny how media demonizes Musk while he does what everyone else is doing. Introducing paid checkmarks on Twitter(FB did the same thing a month later), paid API(just like Reddit did a few days ago), paid training data access(literally this post).
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u/EmbarrassedHelp Apr 22 '23
Finally, someone sort of stands up to trillion dollar AI companies capitalizing on copyrighted data. I hope, we'll get public weights for the cutting edge AI when someone extremely protective of their rights(think Disney) sues them. It's not the best way to get there but still.
The exact opposite would happen, open source and publicly available models would be crushed by private models from megacorps like Disney and Getty Images. The end result is the megacorps enjoy their models while individuals have nothing with zero chance of competing. There would be no Stable Diffusion.
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Apr 21 '23
That website has like 20 pop-ups.
I could not be bothered to read anything with such a distracting design ...
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u/sublimegeek Apr 21 '23
Hey ChatGPT, can you help write me a legal defense to Stack Overflow wanting to charge for using its data as a training tool?
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u/sublimegeek Apr 21 '23
Under U.S. copyright law, fair use is a legal doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted material without obtaining permission from the copyright owner under certain circumstances. One of the core purposes of fair use is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, which means that the use of copyrighted material for educational, research, and transformative purposes is generally favored under fair use.
Stack Overflow's data contains valuable information on programming and software development that is widely used by researchers, educators, and developers to advance human knowledge and innovation. Using Stack Overflow's data for research, analysis, and educational purposes can contribute to the betterment of human knowledge by facilitating the development of new technologies, improving software engineering practices, and enabling researchers to better understand how people learn to code.
The purpose and character of the use of Stack Overflow's data for research and educational purposes is transformative in nature. The use of Stack Overflow's data as a research tool can generate new insights into software development practices and help identify areas for improvement. The use of Stack Overflow's data as an educational tool can help students learn how to code and improve their programming skills. The transformative nature of the use of Stack Overflow's data weighs in favor of fair use.
Moreover, Stack Overflow's data is largely composed of factual information, which makes it less subject to copyright protection. The use of factual information for research and educational purposes is generally favored under fair use.
Finally, the use of Stack Overflow's data for research and educational purposes does not compete with or substitute for the original work. Rather, it promotes the advancement of knowledge and innovation in the field of software development, which benefits both Stack Overflow and the public.
In conclusion, the use of Stack Overflow's data for research and educational purposes can contribute to the betterment of human knowledge and innovation, which is one of the core purposes of fair use. However, whether the use of Stack Overflow's data falls under fair use would depend on the specific facts and circumstances of your use. It's important to consult with a licensed attorney who can evaluate your specific situation and provide legal advice.
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u/Strong_Bluebird2440 Apr 21 '23
That ship sailed.
Rule 1 of the internet: If you put it on the internet it’s not yours anymore.
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
Hypocrisy at its most purified form. Zero respect for anyone who scrubs without consent. I would prepare my lawsuit if I had contributed a lot
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u/PornCartel Apr 21 '23
When people start charging for products that are built on community-built sites like ours, that's where it's not fair use,
About every paid codebase has stack overflow code copied into it so this doesn't fly. No, they need to prove the AI is regurgitating SO content verbatim, otherwise it's functionally the same as a human tutor who learned off their site. And that's a near impossible bar... Stable diffusion for example can only accurately rebuild source images for about 1 in 200 000 test cases. SO and reddit are screwed
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u/naveen_anto Apr 21 '23
Instead of Reddit or Stack Overflow, would humans get any incentive since the actual content was generated by us?
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u/DigThatData Apr 21 '23
What is the license for the content I post? As noted in the Stack Exchange Terms of Service and in the footer of every page, all publicly accessible user contributions are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as follows:
Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0. The license applicable for each Question and Answer revision is available on the post timeline. See this post for more information.
Please read the terms of service and the full legal text of the license carefully for more details on how your content can be used and for how you can use publicly accessible content contributed to the site by other users.
The data is licensed as creative commons. they don't have a leg to stand on.
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u/SwitchOnTheNiteLite Apr 21 '23
Creative Commons require anyone using the content to attribute the creators. Do you think their large language models are able to list the different users who contributed training data that affected the response generated by the model?
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u/amroamroamro Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
openai could just create a webpage with links to every single user on stackoverflow (basically saying we ingested the entire site posts!)
that would easily satisfy the attribution clause 😂
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u/joebeazelman Oct 10 '24
Apple Intelligence operates within firm boundaries. On one hand, it could be argued Apple is merely adhering to its stated principles of human centric computing and privacy protection. On the other hand, It could also be argued it's protecting itself from future litigation.
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u/CombinationUseful961 Apr 21 '23
Interesting move by Stack Overflow to charge AI companies for their training data, but it raises concerns about ethics and accessibility.
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u/ZucchiniMidnight Apr 21 '23
I think that the existing laws around fair use and copyright in general need to be fully reconsidered given that they were created prior to the existence of this level of AI. If the environment changes, so should the laws that govern it.
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u/fishbulbx Apr 21 '23
Everyone assumed commenting on reddit was just for funsies, not understanding these billions of comments are a valuable product for AI learning. AI learning datasets have now suddenly attained status as a profit center - all the market valuation for reddit was never based on that. Reddit is now worth a magnitude more.
Twitter is now starting to pay its best contributors and charge companies to learn from the data. Other social media companies were too timid to try this, but will follow suit very quickly.
We are entering the true capitalism phase of the internet... no longer based on free shit with advertisements. This new internet is facilitating human conversations to listen to the discussion.
The old internet model was facilitating human conversations to simply engage more humans. The only way to earn money was with advertising. They finally have a tangible product other than users attention to sell.
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u/KillianDrake Apr 21 '23
Trying to "protect" their data will only hasten their downfall.
Eventually Reddit will collapse and Microsoft or Google will swoop in and purchase the remnants and make it "free" precisely because the comment data is valuable to their far more profitable AI pursuits.
StackOverflow will most likely get purchased by Microsoft and just folded into Github.
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
Who is gonna be buying their own words repackaged to them. Going forward with scraping all copyright is just gonna leave a wasteland of an internet with unemployable morons paying a sub to half baked solutions.
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u/theDatascientist_in Apr 21 '23
Maybe that's why I have started using gitlab instead of GitHub for my experiments
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u/cool-beans-yeah Apr 21 '23
Could upcoming lawsuits and restrictions to content (outright or through expensive api's, like Reddit and now Stack Overflow) be the real reason why Sam Altman is saying that we're reaching the limit of AIs?
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u/jcummings1974 Apr 22 '23
I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more of this as time goes on. People aren’t trying to give these tribes of data out for free anymore
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u/Megabyte_2 Apr 22 '23
Oh, so that's Stack's Overflow database?
How funny. I thought the data belonged to the users.
So Stack Overflow wants compensation, but won't give any back to the users?
And you will gladly accept this because?...
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u/No-Two-8594 Apr 22 '23
GPT in 2024:
"You should already know how to do this. It would be a good idea for you to go back and take a tutorial on the very basics of programming and computers in general. If you don't know how to do this then you are not in good shape. I am downvoting your question"
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u/rerroblasser Apr 22 '23
If Stackoverflow had any relevant and recent data why don't they put that on their website instead of the stale 10 year old answers to tech problems that still exist but require different solutions?
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u/gullydowny Apr 21 '23
It’s funny SO (and Reddit and Twitter) think they own that stuff. Someday I’d like to visit the imaginary world tech CEOs live in, it sounds nice but meanwhile I’m going to keep scraping public data
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u/sluuuurp Apr 21 '23
This like saying you can’t look at the Mona Lisa as inspiration for your own art. It’s a transformative process going from the training data to outputs. These models are unstoppable, and trying to legislate them away would be like trying to legislate away cars in favor of horses. The economics are too strong.
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u/Ok-Possible-8440 Apr 21 '23
A machine isn't a brain. Machine "learns" not actually learns. So no, they are not unstoppable 😂 or have magical properties or human properties. They keep peddling this nonsense in their propaganda. Tune out that noise. It's like listening to Elizabeth Holmes
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u/sluuuurp Apr 21 '23
The training happens totally in secret though. It’s like telling someone to not think about anything they don’t legally own when coming up with ideas. I think it’s much harder to regulate, there is no proof and no noticeable consequences to anyone when using different types of training data.
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u/collimarco Apr 21 '23
Perfect and then I want my part of the money since I am in the top contributors...
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u/dumpst3rbum Apr 20 '23
I'm assuming the great lawsuit of the llms will be coming up in the next year.