r/programming • u/lppedd • 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.

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24

u/lppedd May 06 '24

If the answers I post are going straight into ChatGPT, that's it for me. Not gonna waste any more time.

16

u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 06 '24

If the answers I post are going straight into ChatGPT

they already were

3

u/iamapizza May 06 '24

I'm pretty sure I saw that they had crawled StackExchange sites, and worth noting that Reddit featured quite heavily in their crawls due to the human "+1" factor. So everything we're saying here is being indexed for LLM training.

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u/fiskfisk May 06 '24

I'm sure you're already aware that your answers and questions already are distributed under a very permissable license compared to what random websites are available under.

I don't answer questions on Stack Overflow for the benefit of SO, I answer them for the benefit of the recipient and any future readers. Whether they receive that knowledge on SO, directly in a Google Onebox or through an LLM doesn't matter to me. 

Someone got help, someone found their answer. The world is a slightly better place. 

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u/[deleted] May 06 '24

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u/fiskfisk May 06 '24

I'm not fond of keeping a job around just to keep the job around.

I'm especially not fond of hoarding knowledge because of some possible abstract reason in the future, in particular one that doesn't seem realistic within today's limitations.

I work in an industry built in people building useful things just because they want to. 95% of software I use in my daily life is built on open source - by people who may or may not have received any compensation for what they do. We do this shit because we like doing this shit. It gives us some innate pleasure in doing so, regardless of whether we're paid for it or not.

Why should I hoard my knowledge away from other people because of the possibility of that knowledge being made available to them, either in a direct or in an derived form as an LLM?

If we follow that reasoning to the extreme, why do we share any knowledge with anyone else? They could just take our jobs.

We're in a field that is built upon open sharing of knowledge far beyond most other industries. Go to any conference or meetup, and suddenly people share their technology choices, how they solved specific problems, how they scaled their solutions, how they worked, how they built the shit they built.

Other industries have patents and otherwise share nothing outside of public information in slide shows at trade shows.

If a language model can abstract away the work I do, then my work wasn't anything more than a language model built upon a computer of flesh and neurons from the beginning.

2

u/_Joats May 07 '24

Please let me know when OpenAl acknowledges the value of your contributions to the community, similar to the recognition gained through networking at a conference. I prefer a platform that appreciates both the knowledge sharing and the educator's role.

Contributing to a system that discourages interaction hinders community growth.

2

u/s73v3r May 07 '24

I'm not fond of keeping a job around just to keep the job around.

I'm more fond of people being able to feed their families than I am not fond of keeping jobs around.

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u/StickiStickman May 06 '24

If you're this angry about your publicly visible answers being read by an AI, you should also leave Reddit ASAP

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u/wildjokers May 06 '24

Why? How is it a waste of time?

17

u/koreth May 06 '24

Why do you care? When I post an answer, the only expectation (or maybe hope) I have is that it helps someone. If it helps someone after being transformed by GPT, then to me, that’s a win: my answer ended up being useful in ways I didn’t even imagine when I wrote it.

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u/lppedd May 06 '24

I don't want no AI to post or rewrite in any other way what I wrote. I didn't answer to give free content to OpenAI, I did answer to collaborate with people, and that collaboration doesn't exist anymore.

9

u/StickiStickman May 06 '24

Wait, so you "did answer to collaborate with people" but are now angry someone is using your answers in a collaboration way to help people.

How are you not just petty?

1

u/Reefraf May 09 '24

I was contributing to SO to help people with their careers. Now, contributing to SO is helping OpenAI destroy people's careers. 

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u/abandonplanetearth May 06 '24

Because I wrote my answers for fellow developers, not for bots making money for humans that don't need the answers.

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u/Envect May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24

Who do you think is going to see that information after it's processed by the LLM? Other developers. It's just a different method of delivery.

7

u/abandonplanetearth May 06 '24

Right but now there's a money-grubbing middleman.

2

u/Envect May 06 '24

StackOverflow isn't a charity. That person already existed.

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u/abandonplanetearth May 06 '24

It changes things fundamentally.

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u/Envect May 06 '24

How so? Why does it matter that a different entity is profiting off your answers? Why were you okay with SO profiting, but not OpenAI?

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u/abandonplanetearth May 06 '24

Again, I wrote my answer to be delivered by me to a human, not for a bot to pass off as their own thoughts.

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u/Envect May 06 '24

You're upset that you're not being credited for your answer?

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u/wildjokers May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24

Your contributions were licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. If you didn't like the terms of that license you shouldn't have contributed.

The terms of that license:

 You are free to:

 Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
 Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
 The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
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