 Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers. Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. 149 comments
It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you.   @ben Stack Overflow has already been monetizing your answers with ads for years. If โused for profitโ is your main complaint, youโre a little late. @ben lawsuit! Lawsuit! Lawsuit! "Terms can change without notice" etc clauses are often unenforceable. People should class-action these predatory scrapers. I BET m$ has used data they did not have rights to for training. Errbody should sue. Sue sue sue. "AI" is the providence of mankind, not some rich douche  I don't think this is going to work. a) You gave them a license to use your answers. It is not revokable. b) You *can* and *should* ask to be disassociated from your answers. AFAIK, this satisfies any GDPR requirements. (If you don't think so, please explain.) Source: I used to be deeply involved in the moderation on that site before the enshittification made me quit some years back.  That said the licence is a CC license, correct? Use of that data to train an AI model would remove the attribution that's required; though I'm sadly aware that big tech doesn't seem to care about that and the courts haven't yet stopped them. :P  @ben GDPR does not apply here since its not personal data. It's technical data.    @ben you gave them information for free. You don't own it, they do. That was the working relationship. Imagine if you were working for a company producing work and you suddenly tried to sabotage that work. That's what you were trying to do, sabotage it. They would be perfectly within their rights to restrict your access. The moral of this story is, if you want to retain ownership then don't give it away (for free) to someone else.  ... Is it stealing the answers off Stack Overflow any more than people do by using the answers? @atatassault @martin_piper @ben Yup! AI is theft at this point. Expensive, world killing, water sucking theft. Enjoy your dead planet! The planet was already on a course for death before we figured out how to make useful brain analogues on silicon hardware. Also, if and when we shift completely to carbon neutral power, the amount of electricity that AI consumes (which will only go down as processing becomes increasingly more power efficient) won't matter @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben @intransitivelie @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben I'd say being able to predict protein folding is pretty fucking useful. @atatassault @intransitivelie @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben This isn't an LLM using data without attribution lol @bananarama @intransitivelie @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben Deep Learning, Machine Learning, LLM, etc all mean the same thing: Neural Network AI @atatassault @intransitivelie @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben Additionally, each of those terms have distinct technical meanings. They're not the same. @bananarama @atatassault @intransitivelie @jlsigman @ben that is transformative which is in the agreement @martin_piper @atatassault @intransitivelie @jlsigman @ben Oops, still requires attribution. Try again. EDIT: Also notice, it is share-alike. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben itโs different, therefore litigatable as copyright infringement. @InkomTech @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben You'd need to sue basically every single corporation ever that does its own coding, as I GUARANTEE you that they all have code an engineer got from Stack Overflow. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben youโre missing the โthis is an unauthorized use of material I wrote and therefore retain copyright ofโ. Folks reading SO != AI training, just like theaters and dvds!= streaming revenue. @InkomTech @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben People reading and using code from SO by mouse and keyboard is not conceptually or mechanically different than using a computer to automatically do it. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben I could agree with you, but then weโd both be wrong. Again, a clickthru license isnโt remotely strong enough to strip someone of their ownership. Copyright is a motherfucker. Over and over, creatives have clawed back IP and forced a renegotiation due to new media, new venues, new uses. @InkomTech @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben So you gonna be the one to sue every single corporation? Because they all use SO code. Because people are lazy. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben SMH. read what I wrote again. Peer forum use is a different use. While that would likely survive as released by acceptance of the TOS, new uses of copyright (AI training) likely wonโt. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben odds seem high that you donโt understand copyright. Good luck coming up to speed on it; my responses arenโt for you, but so anyone understanding copyright law can evaluate / discuss the risks in investing in this AI land grab and of SOโs move. Good luck. @InkomTech @atatassault @jlsigman @ben I understand it better than you obviously don't. You don't own your public posts on such a website, the company does. @InkomTech @atatassault @jlsigman @ben it's not a click through license when you have an account. It does does mean they own the technical content of the posts and can do what they like with it. @InkomTech @atatassault @jlsigman @ben your denial is not factually correct. @atatassault @jlsigman @martin_piper @ben let me amend: the strongest way a creative person can lose copyright: work for hire. I ainโt never gotten paid by SO. What I write remains mine. @martin_piper @ben thatโs not exactly how copyright works. And any click-thru license that predates โwe will train an AI model with your contentโ is as at-risk to a claim of unauthorized use of copyright material as streaming is being argued to be by performers. Remember the WGA / SAG strike? And remember the six-figure threats in โcopying a movie is theftโ ads ahead of videos?  @martin_piper @ben I'm not buying this. Using a service is not the same as working for a company. There is no working relationship. There is a community where people try to help other people without gaining any salary in exchange, and a company reclaiming all that knowledge as own to speculate using AI. Maybe the moral of the story is to make them stop instead of us having to bear that weight, it sounded like victim-blaming imo. @ben @stefan Once you commit something to any server there is little chance of killing it. Given a few hours, if it's valuable enough, what you have committed will be incorporated into Bayesian Priors in a model. Your best chance is to add #Noise or #Entropy around the what you committed. Similar but confusing or dirty @ben @stefan I killed off my 7th reincarnation on Twitter 2 Years ago. Went back a few weeks ago. My zombie lives on and is now following #GymJordan. I'm gay and all, but I wouldn't fuck Gymbo with your dick.  @ben I recall hearing somewhere that all that content is a super permissive copy left license and it turns out it is! One that requires attribution and transformations to declare what was changed. I'm sure nothing will come of that but if any lawyers out there want to take up the banner, a person could make a strong argument that open AI is incapable of honoring the license. ๐ค  @lyonsinbeta @ben AI canโt even tell the truth, so yes it breaks Creative Commons laws and regulations. @lyonsinbeta @ben This reminded me of OpenAI having a GDPR complaint filed against them, as it will output information about people but those people have no way of asking to have it removed or what the source is. https://noyb.eu/en/chatgpt-provides-false-information-about-people-and-openai-cant-correct-it Presumably the lack of sources would also bite them here. @ben@m.benui.ca idk if youre in the eu, but this sounds like a gdpr violation to me @ben Bad news, man. You gave them your expertise, so they took it. Yeah, I don't like it either. No sane person would. Your sweat equity means nothing to them. @ben @lisamelton isnโt that a legal case right there? For someone with money to throw at itโฆ which very few of us have :(   @ben one *could* take the position that all answers being plagiarized and used to create a machine that will mislead people by mushing those answers into plausible but wrong advice, negating the site's original purpose, is an exceptional circumstance   Get off corrupt substack. Everyone off corrupt substack Everyone tell everyone to get off corrupt substack Tell every substack account they are boycotted. End corruption. @ben@m.benui.ca Oh, so they wanted news of you being screwed over kept a secret, huh? Classy of them. โ:blobcat_eyeroll:โ So damn sorry this happened.  @ben you can't delete your account, either. If you try, all they do is put a pseudonym on it -- they don't even gesture towards deidentification by stopping search on user @ben "This means that you cannot revoke permission..." The terms you agreed to are very specific to say you cannot do that. https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public#licensing @ben And no matter what, they condescend to users and lecture them as though they have behaved like naughty little children.  @ben I stopped posting anything on StackExchange years ago (forgot the exact reason) but when I started pruning my content I also got put in SEJail. For a few days. I spent the next two months deleting my answers a few at a time. @ben SO believes the answers are theirs, which is why they put them back and suspended you. @ben So let me get this straight. * They have taken your work * You changed your work which you defaced as part of their theft * (Have they left your name on it?) I'm assuming they have left your name on it so it tracks back to you even though they made the change * And are now using it as part of their income stream and for further commercial endeavours. Yeah this is super fucked. @ben There may be an avenue to exercise Moral Rights here in Canada. I'm not a legal professional though but I'd like to see how it would or would not work.  @ben Sadly Stack Overflow has gone down hill. Most of the time if my research points me in their direction, the "accepted answer" is out dated.  "It's saddening to hear well meaning batshit crazy things people who think they will benefit from an unfair system would say." @ben they did volunteer "except under extraordinary circumstances", so I think you can claim that here. This is an extraordinary change to stack overflow. Such a change hasn't happened to it since it began ... extraordinary.  @ben Even harder probably are insertion of sneaky edits/bugs ideally in a way that a human would see it through it.  @ben This happened to me too. What finally "worked" was to file a GDPR request to remove all my data.  @ben Fucked up fun fact. AI companies (among others) have already scraped everything for free months and years ago.  @ben Sadly their database is so massive that โIโll just run this myselfโ doesnโt work. All the content is cc by-sa, so in theory anyone could build a competing platform. But they were pretty effective at repelling that. @ben Honest question: What is your problem with this partnership? The content is quite public and available under a Creative Commons license anyways, so the partnership probably won't change a lot with respect to training material for the AI.  I would start shitposting/answering every question you don't even know. Maybe you can ruin your reputation there that they oddly seem to want you to keep.  @ben doing that would destroy knowledge... @ben@m.benui.ca If you delete your Account shouldnt it also delete the question as of GDPR? As it is data which is associated with you.  @ben welp looks like they had this planned from the get go, and were faster than I thought. Very sad, and I am wondering if they just won't let you modify popular answers/questions in the future without manual reviewing. Not unexpected but very disappointing Related thread:  @ben @PurpleJillybeans They really show their hand with just how easily they lie. "Extensive deletions" clearly don't take a lot of effort to repair: they can just roll them back with a few clicks. @ben It's awful business practice, but not surprising at all. SO is tanking because of CoPilot/ChatGPT et al. |
Gregory's Server
I'm requesting that my questions and answers be permanently deleted under GDPR.