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1. Embed this notice
   mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 07:14:10 JST mcc

   Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

   https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

   Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: and clacke like this.
   • carl marks, clacke and AnthonyJK-Admin and 3 others repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 07:37:06 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • chris@strafpla.net

     @chris Yeah. But for this to be true, we need a Stack Overflow replacement. And when Reddit went evil, the move to Lemmy doesn't seem to have succeeded as well as the move from Twitter to Mastodon.

   • Embed this notice
     chris@strafpla.net (chris@mstdn.strafpla.net)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 07:37:09 JST chris@strafpla.net

     in reply to

     @mcc So developers will stop sharing information on #StackOverflow and future #Copilot and friends will be forever stuck in the past, answering questions about historically relevant frameworks and languages.
     #LLM #StuckOverflow

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 11:43:30 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Earlier today I edited my (small) set of Stack Overflow posts to add the sentence "I do not consent to my words being used to train OpenAI" to the end. Within hours, all these edits were reversed and I got a warning email for "removing or defacing content". I did not remove any content. If this small sentence is "defacing", it is a very minor defacement. In no way was the experience of other users made worse by me adding one sentence.

     To Stack Overflow, you are not a person. You are "content".

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
     Matthew Lyon repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 11:43:30 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Not only does Stack Overflow say you don't have a right to remove your words from Stack Overflow, according to Stack Overflow, you don't even have the right to decide what words Stack Overflow publishes under your name.

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 12:22:04 JST mcc

     in reply to

     In the meantime, I have been suspended for 17 hours to "cool down". OpenAI is so, so offended by me saying I don't want them to train on their content. Clearly I am very angry and need to sit in time out.

     Noticed this last detail only when I tried to edit my profile and discovered you can't edit your profile while "suspended".

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: and clacke like this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:41 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Glenn Fleishman

     @glennf I don't think they view themselves as a "business" anymore. I think they now view themselves as an asset that can be sold to AI generation companies.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Glenn Fleishman (glennf@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:42 JST Glenn Fleishman

     in reply to

     @mcc This is a very interesting strategy they are pursuing to ruin their business.

   • Embed this notice
     Glenn Fleishman (glennf@twit.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:46 JST Glenn Fleishman

     in reply to

     @mcc AI sort of ate their business, so I guess they are returning the favor by feeding themselves to it. (I don't think LLMs provide an accurate alternative to Stack Overflow, but I think Code Pilot and other stuff shunted a lot of traffic.)

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:49 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Corn Woman 🌽

     @WomanCorn If the point of Stack Overflow is to be a block of programming-related text to sell to LLM companies, then it would actually be rational to ban LLM text, as it would poison the LLM inputs.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Corn Woman 🌽 (womancorn@schelling.pt)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:50 JST Corn Woman 🌽

     in reply to

     @mcc

     huh. I thought the LLMs were already trained on StackOverflow.

     It's available under some kind of public license, I think. There are a bunch of clone page out there, anyway.

   • Embed this notice
     ocdtrekkie (ocdtrekkie@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:57:54 JST ocdtrekkie

     in reply to

     @mcc I can't wait until StackOverflow learns about GDPR.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     GhostOnTheHalfShell (ghostonthehalfshell@masto.ai)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:59:00 JST GhostOnTheHalfShell

     in reply to

     @mcc

     Gee it would be too bad if users started posting chat gpt garbage on the site and upvoting it,

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     4am ❧ (a2_4am@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 13:59:47 JST 4am ❧

     in reply to

     @mcc an article went around recently about "rewilding" the Internet that made the analogy to clear cutting an old growth forest. You get incredible wood, but you can only do it once.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:12 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • chris@strafpla.net

     @chris If I were actually trying to create a stackoverflow clone, I'd have the default license be something like "all code blocks are CC0 but all human text outside the code blocks is CC-BY-SA". That would I think match the unspoken expectations both contributors and readers have.

   • Embed this notice
     chris@strafpla.net (chris@mstdn.strafpla.net)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:14 JST chris@strafpla.net

     in reply to

     @mcc So we’d be looking for Schrödingers license, allowing and forbidding closed derivative works at the same time :-)

     (I have a feeling that a lot of licenses only work because nobody has a close look at how their objects are used.)

     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:15 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • chris@strafpla.net

     @chris I suppose one thing to consider is if a federated pool of knowledge is CC-BY-SA, then we only need a court ruling that OpenAI violates CC-BY-SA and the federated pool becomes AI-safe. Whereas SO can, (or already has) change the TOS so they own rights to relicense all content.

     …but of course, CC-BY-SA is also incredibly inconvenient for a SO clone because everyone will generally want to copypaste sample code!

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:16 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • chris@strafpla.net

     @chris I don't know. It's an interesting question because Stack Overflow is inherently more search-focused than Lemmy or Mastodon.

     A good model for a distributed/ownerless SO might wind up looking more like bluesky than mastodon.

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:16 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • chris@strafpla.net

     @chris And, of course, there's the weird element that the SO license *already* does not permit AI on a facial reading, and a distributed SO would probably be *easier* to scrape than the centralized one. So you're not actually preventing AI exploitation, you're only punishing one corporation (SO) for the AI bait-and-switch.

   • Embed this notice
     chris@strafpla.net (chris@mstdn.strafpla.net)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:16 JST chris@strafpla.net

     in reply to

     @mcc I personally see less problem in scraping a federated pool of knowledge but I absolutely hate that stackoverflow now owns this knowledge and can keep people from using it but sell “AI” as a service to them.

   • Embed this notice
     chris@strafpla.net (chris@mstdn.strafpla.net)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:46:17 JST chris@strafpla.net

     in reply to

     @mcc IIRC Mastodon is older than Lemmy and the current move to Mastodon/Fedi happened in multiple waves, so it may be too early for higher expectations.
     For stackoverflow I expect some degradation of quality since they accept “AI” generated content. This may additionally frustrate high quality authors and motivate them to leave. We’ll see.
     What would a federated stack overflow look like if we were to invent it?

   • Embed this notice
     Advanced Persistent Teapot (http_error_418@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 09-May-2024 15:56:31 JST Advanced Persistent Teapot

     • emilygorcenski
     • Stewart

     @emilygorcenski @mcc @stewartsmith I assume that's their terms and conditions state that by posting it on their site, you give them the copyright