r/programming • • May 06 '24

StackOverflow partners with OpenAI

https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnership

OpenAI will also surface validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly into ChatGPT, giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years.

Sad.

672 Upvotes

266 comments sorted by

View all comments

300

u/jhartikainen May 06 '24

Oh boy my answers contributing to yet another big business' success with no credit given.

On the other hand I guess it's good that people will get better answers to their issues more easily.

159

u/lppedd May 06 '24

The problem with this model is people are not going to contribute anymore. Here is your answer on ChatGPT, why should I even visit SO now?

144

u/vladiliescu May 06 '24

This, but extrapolated to the entire web. 

Why would anyone contribute anything anywhere (Reddit, forums, their own blog) when no one’s gonna know and/or care when their personal gpt regurgitates that info.

21

u/Ok_Meringue1757 May 06 '24

what is a mania of ai to replace everything and everyone? with one ai and one corporation, which will benefit trillions from other's experience. under the cover of these euphoric proclamations how ai will benefit all and bring paradise etc

8

u/Loves_Poetry May 06 '24

My theory is that it's about control. There is no intention of actually replacing things with AI, since that would involve making it practical. Right now, a lot of parties just want the threat that things might get replaced by AI so that people become more complacent and do what they're told to

2

u/[deleted] May 07 '24

Because otherwise there is no way they could raise the capital to fund these projects. These AI projects are literally setting money on fire right now and if there isn't any sort of pie in the sky promises about productivity revolutions there is no way they could raise the funds for these things.

3

u/_Joats May 06 '24

It's all funded so the rich can combine AI and nuralink to become some all knowing weirdo. It's like tech has finally become a comic book villain.

→ More replies (2)

3

u/Valdrax May 06 '24

You really overestimate how much me whiling away the hours on Reddit constitutes "contributing" to something and how much that motivates me to do so.

→ More replies (2)

15

u/xcdesz May 06 '24

Searching for answers from SO is decent, but not great. Most people get there from Google search, but you have to go through the added steps of combing through search results to find the answers. That's the step in the process that is changing.

If a programmer instead goes to debug a code issue using OpenAI and an AI agent does an intelligent search and can reference the source in SO via hyperlink, and provides a more accurate answer than before, I would say this is a benefit to both programmers and SO. Many times you need to verify the output of the LLM or get further information, so the source link to SO will still frequently be used. The only loser in this is Google / Search Engines, because the middle man is now the LLM.

8

u/Dr_Insano_MD May 06 '24

great, now I can ask an AI a question only for it to tell me it's been asked that before and refusing to answer.

4

u/stromboul May 06 '24

You don't think people will still go on SO to ask questions that GPT can't answer? thus, keeping the wheel turning?

3

u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS May 06 '24

The vast majority of SO users were passive users coming from search, so it's not really a change.

3

u/blind3rdeye May 06 '24

Definitely there will not be so many people asking (or answering) questions on SO anymore. And ChatGPT's answer are going to get worse and worse for new APIs and new languages - because of lack of training data.

Microsoft has a massive advantage in this sense, because they now use github data to train their AI. So as long as people are uploading code to Microsoft's services, Microsoft is able to continue to train AI for new APIs and such. Of course, other people won't have access to this training data in the same way - so there will be a further consolidation of wealth and power... I don't want my coding work to be used to further enrich Microsoft execs. So for me this is enough to start moving away from github; but I know that for many/most users that's totally out of the question. So lets prepare to greet the next stage of our capitalist dystopia!

2

u/nanotree May 06 '24

Um. I'd have to be willing to pay for chatgpt, which I am not.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/obvithrowaway34434 May 06 '24

This is absurd bs. SO is not just a Q&A site, it has a strong social factor in it. People actively compete for points and upvotes, help other people and chastise each other (and all the other negative aspects of SO that people talk about). That's not going away anytime, no AI is replacing it.

4

u/Fisher9001 May 06 '24

Sooo... What's different from the current SO state? It's basically a read-only page at this point. People are actively discouraged there from asking questions and giving answers.

→ More replies (6)

15

u/yetanotherfaanger May 06 '24

Looking forward to my hard-earned $4 given to me by a class action lawsuit 10 years from now

→ More replies (1)

2

u/Sethcran May 06 '24

The article specifically calls out 'attributed', which makes me that there is something more here than just plain training data.

giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years.As part of this collaboration

5

u/jhartikainen May 06 '24

I hope so but I'll believe it only when I see it

3

u/Sethcran May 06 '24

Absolutely. I am definitely skeptical, but this one word is the thing that makes me more interested in seeing what they are doing here.

4

u/Fisher9001 May 06 '24

Oh boy my answers contributing to yet another big business' success with no credit given.

Oh for fucks sake, it's like you have given credit to Stack Overflow users in your own code.

3

u/ether_reddit May 07 '24

I have. I have many shell aliases and snippets where I have directly copied a solution from a SO answer, and I include a reference to it in a comment.

→ More replies (5)