Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT

Hey ChatGPT, how can I ...

"Locking as this is a duplicate of [unrelated question]"

And then links to a similar sounding but ultimately totally unrelated site.

Is this a joke?

ITT: People unable to recognize a joke

It's way easier to figure that out than check ChatGPT hallucinations. There's usually someone saying why a response in SO is wrong, either in another response or a comment. You can filter most of the garbage right at that point, without having to put it in your codebase and discover that the hard way. You get none of that information with ChatGPT. The data spat out is not equivalent.

When you paste that code you do it in your private IDE, in a dev environment and you test it thoroughly before handing it off to the next person to test before it goes to production.

Hitting up ChatPPT for the answer to a question that you then vomit out in a meeting as if it’s knowledge is totally different.

If you use LLMs in your professional work, you're crazy

Eh, we use copilot at work and it can be pretty helpful. You should always check and understand any code you commit to any project, so if you just blindly paste flawed code (like with stack overflow,) that's kind of on you for not understanding what you're doing.

The last time I saw someone talk about using the right LLM tool for the job, they were describing turning two minutes of writing a simple map/reduce into one minute of reading enough to confirm the generated one worked. I think I'll pass on that.

This. I use LLM for work, primarily to help create extremely complex nested functions.

I don’t count on LLM’s to create anything new for me, or to provide any data points. I provide the logic, and explain exactly what I want in the end.

I take a process which normally takes 45 minutes daily, test it once, and now I have reclaimed 43 extra minutes of my time each day.

It’s easy and safe to test before I apply it to real data.

It’s missed the mark a few times as I learned how to properly work with it, but now I’m consistently getting good results.

Other use cases are up for debate, but I agree when used properly hallucinations are not much of a problem. When I see people complain about them, that tells me they’re using the tool to generate data, which of course is stupid.

This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers.

This is a bad thing.

Not just because it will put the people you're talking about out of work in the short term, but because it will prevent the next generation of developers from getting that low-level experience. They're not "idiots", they're inexperienced. They need to get experience. They won't if they're replaced by automation.

So, the whole point of learning is to ask questions from people who know more than you, so that you can gain the knowledge you need to succeed…

So… if you try to use these LLMs to replace parts of sectors, where there need to be people that can work their way to the next tier as they learn more and get better at their respective sectors, you do realize that eventually there will no longer be people that can move up their respective tier/position, because people like you said “Fuck ‘em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!” So now there are no more doctors, or real programmers, because people like you thought it would just be the GREATEST idea to replace humans with fucking LLMs.

You do see that, right?

Calling people fucking stupid, because they are learning, is actually pretty fucking stupid.

This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know… they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly.

Do so at your own peril. Because the thing is, a person will learn from their mistakes and grow in knowledge and experience over time. An LLM is unlikely to do the same in a professional environment for two big reasons:

1. The company using the LLM would have to send data back to the creator of the LLM. This means their proprietary work could be at risk. The AI company could scoop them, or a data leak would be disastrous.
2. Alternatively, the LLM could self-learn and be solely in house without any external data connections. A company with an LLM will never go for this, because it would mean their model is improving and developing out of their control. Their customized version may end up being better than their the LLM company's future releases. Or, something might go terribly wrong with the model while it learns and adapts. If the LLM company isn't held legally liable, they're still going to lose that business going forward.

On top of that, you need your inexperienced noobs to one day become the ones checking the output of an LLM. They can't do that unless they get experience doing the work. Companies already have proprietary models that just require the right inputs and pressing a button. Engineers are still hired though to interpret the results, know what inputs are the right ones, and understand how the model works.

A company that tries replacing them with LLMs is going to lose in the long run to competitors.

This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

Anarchosyndicalism ftw.

List of Distributist parties in the UK:

• National Distributist Party
• British National Party
• National Front

Hmmm, maybe the Catholic part isn't the only part worth reviewing.

Also worth noting that the Conservative Party's 'Big Society' schtick in 2010 was wrapped in the trappings of distributism.

Not that all this diminishes it entirely but it does seem to be an entry drug for exploitation by the right.

I gotta hold my hand up and state that I am not read up on it at all, so happy to be corrected. But my impression is that Pope Leo XIII's conception was to reduce secular power so as to leave a void for the church to fill. And it's the potential exploitation of that void that attracts the far right too.

I don't know. It feels a bit like "When I quit my employer will realize how much they depended on me." The realization tends to be on the other side.

But while SO may keep functioning fine it would be great if this caused other places to spring up as well. Reddit and X/Twitter are still there but I'm glad we have the fediverse.

god damn- I went over to Digg yesterday to see what its been like and I shit you not, it is links to reddit threads and instagram posts

It's a metaphor for us killing ourselves in the processes of deforestation, not a story of someone actually making a coffin.

I counted around 30-32 in panel 2.

I think the reason for those bans is that they don't want you rebelling and are showing that they don't need you personally, thus ban.

Of course it's all retained.

Isn't that illegal in most countries?

They also committed to providing open dumps of their data to make it free to all. At the start, they were doing all the right things.

Yes, next to Pen Island

Also a market there. Especially among programmers. You might be onto something.

Open access != Copyleft, but its a decent start.

CC attribution doesn't require you to necessarily have the credits immediately with the content, but it would result in one of the world's longest web pages as it would need to have the name of the poster and a link to every single comment they used as training data, and stack overflow has roughly 60 million questions and answers combined.

IF its outputs are considered derivative works.

That’s the joke

Remember when adding the word blockchain to an Iced Tea company's name caused share prices to jump?

At this point I’m assuming most if not all of these content deals are essentially retroactive. They already scrapped the content and found it useful enough to try and secure future use, or at least exclude competitors.

Honestly? I'm down with that. And when the LLM's end up pricing themselves out of usefulness, we'll still have the fediverse version. Having free sites on the net with solid crowd-sourced information is never a bad thing even if other people pick up the data and use it.

It's when private sites like Duolingo and Reddit crowd source the information and then slowly crank down the free aspect that we have the problems.

The Ad sponsored web model is not viable forever.

But users and instances would be able to state that they do not want their content commercialized. On StackOverflow you have no control over that.