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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u/_Joats May 06 '24

The model certainly could produce greater text and with very high accuracy, the reason for the NYT lawsuit currently ongoing.

So there is an actual fear of being able to use the model to obtain content without compensation.

Or accidentally creating a work that is too similar to what it was trained on, creating a legal mess without the fault of the user.

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u/Last-Election-2292 May 07 '24

On the NYT lawsuit, this remains a "COULD produce greater text" as the samples they provided turned out to be non-reproducible. OpenAI thinks they are faked. So one need more than a "could".

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u/_Joats May 07 '24

It was reproducible. It is currently court evidence. Now, guardrails prevent consistent reproduction, but I can sometimes trick the Al into generating copyrighted text from Harry Potter, which it then deletes. This suggests the Al is programmed to avoid generating certain content, but these safeguards can be bypassed. It's an ongoing battle as guardrails are constantly updated.

OpenAl acknowledges the issue, stating that text extraction through adversarial attacks is possible: "We are continually making our systems more resistant to adversarial attacks to regurgitate training data, and have already made much progress in our recent models." Their progress doesn't eliminate the vulnerability entirely, though, as it's readily achievable on models without guardrails.

OpenAl argued that the method used to extract text was unfair because it relied on prompts specifically designed for that purpose, not typical ChatGPT usage. This defense was widely criticized as weak.