this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Would be a shame if someone used ChatGPT to generate bad answers and a short script to resubmit them back to Stackoverflow. So awful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

StackOverflow: *grabs money on monetizing massive amounts of user-contributed content without consulting or compensating the users in any way*

Users: *try to delete it all to prevent it*

StackOverflow: *your contributions belong to the community, you can't do that*

Pretty fucked-up laws. A lot of lawsuits going on right now against AI companies for similar issues. In this case, StackOverflow is entitled to be compensated for its partnership, and because the answers are all CC BY-SA 3.0, no one can complain. Now, that SA? Whatever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

This is similar to when I heard reddit was doing the API lockdown, I wrote an automation bot over the weekend that self-destructed my subreddit and the entire post history. The bot also automatically downloaded and archived all of the content on my local machine.

It was annoying because at first I couldn't get access to older posts since at the time reddit had changed their API to only show the first X posts (100 or 1,000 or whatever). So I told my bot to delete the posts as it archived them so as I deleted content, reddit had no choice but to populate the page with the older posts.

And that's how I archived my subreddit. Reddit banned me two days later for automation, lol. I did not break any of the reddit or reddit api ToS during this process but I guess I upset someone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately they still have everything. It's good for the "human" visibility (lack of) but they have the data still

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

We can’t even communicate with out being leeched upon. Fuck this is grim

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I feel like this content craze is going to evaporate soon because all the new content from here forward is sure to be polluted by LLM output already. AI is fast becoming a snake eating its own tail.

That reminds me. I should go update my licenses to spit in the face of AI training companies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why now? Other people have been profiting off of your Stack Overflow answers for years. This is nothing new.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Those answers were given in good faith under the presumption that they would be read and used by another person. Not used to train something to remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "remove the interactions which motivated the answer in the first place"? I'm not sure I follow.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

People like being social and having discourse online. Probably what brought you here in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren't there we're anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it's a thought terminating cliche when someone says, " existed before so why's it suddenly a problem?". It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually "just ask questions". Where every response is "but why?" which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it's not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Good luck with the deleting. It often just means UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There was similar things done on Reddit during the big exit. I doubt it achieved what people expected it to achieve. Even if they’re not visible externally, I’m sure they can easily access (thereby make deals to license) the data out of their backend / backup; just a matter of how hard they want to try (hint: it’s really not very hard).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Yeah during the reddit exodus, people were recommending to overwrite your comment with garbage before deleting it. This (probably) forces them to restore your comment from backup. But realistically they were always going to harvest the comments stored in backup anyway, so I don't think it caused them any more work.

If anything, this probably just makes reddit's/SO's partnership more valuable because your comments are now exclusive to reddit's/SO's backend, and other companies can't scrape it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It's not a forum; there's no such thing as "your posts." It's more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren't "yours" any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don't have the right to take it back.

Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don't think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like "destroying it to save it."