[salil999]

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.

[drubio]

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.

[Txmm]

For me it is less about credit and more about access. Stack overflow is public and freely available - I’ll give answers for the benefit of the community. ChatGPT is a product, it’s locked behind accounts and limited unless you’re paying.

They changed the deal on their end? I’ll delete my posts.

[asadotzler]

That's a completely silly reply. SO didn't lock me out of the content I created there and charge me $20/mo to re-use it.

[Aurornis]

> 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]

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.

[arcbyte]

> 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

[internetter]

This feels more akin to a company mirroring stackoverflow and passing it off as its own, which I would object to.

[roygbiv2]

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

[Qem]

At least before the answers would benefit the whole community, fulfilling the spirit of CC licensing. Once it's fed to a LLM, it's essentially a form of laundering, as it's dubious the output of the models will also be free under CC. The "open" in OpenAI is effectively fake advertising. It's a proprietary enterprise misleading people by pretending open something.

[drubio]

Yeah, but you get points and badges for feeding it free knowledge, they get the cash, go figure. It's the perfect pre-NFT grift.

[osigurdson]

>> feeding your own knowledge for free into a proprietary system

Isn't that exactly what stackoverflow was?

[acc_297]

I think people feel differently about contributing to SO or wikipedia or even quora than they would labelling CIFAR images for instance. Maybe it's a distinction without a difference but people don't usually contribute to things like stack overflow with the objective of training an AI model.