it begins... users leave Stack Overflow 

"OpenAI" already used stackoverflow's data to train their GPTs. Now they are trying to cover that up.

Closed! Another user posted a similar video.

English is not my mother tongue and I speak Arabic I was browsing people's problems in Angler, which is my field, and I was answering in an organized manner and in formal English, and I was not surprised that Stack thought that if I was using artificial intelligence, I was banned for six days. Frankly, this is annoying.

Closed as duplicate. No I don't care the previous video is different.

I thought AI models were already being trained on SO data for a long time?

Who would figure a well-mannered chatbot would smash stackoverflow to the ground. When I was starting out and I couldn't find a solution, I had to ask and got bombarded with downvotes and insults. Asking a question was like preparing for a job interview, where the reward was 3 lines of code... Yes I did my research, yes I searched for duplicates, yes I did that, yes I did this, no I couldn't find the answer... Just to get marked as a duplicate of a completely different thing that didn't solve any of my problems.

We could go back to 2009 where the best answer were in the comments of personal blogs.

Every AI answer trained on Stack: RTFM

Remember when every Reddit user went up in arms against API changes and then everyone stopped using Reddit? Yeah, me neither. This will blow over in a month. Handful of people who feel strongly about it will leave and the site will continue existing as if nothing has happened.

I'm quite inexperienced with programming. I posted a question and it was marked as duplicate. The trouble was that I knew so little about what my issue was, I was unable to successfully find it by searching. If a question isn't worth answering, don't answer it. I tried reddit for my questions and it is a surprisingly friendly place. I'll never post to SO again.

Stackoverflow needs to be archived.

Claude: We already have everything SO.

hmm, ok, you can train ai on existing questions and answers, but what about future questions where will be no community to ask? Imho ai is cutting branch it is sitting on and stack overflow is shortsighted

I loved the video about SO toxicity! Is it toxic to enjoy some schadenfreude over online toxicity?

for the past 2 to 3 years all the answers I needed came from github issues, so has a huge issue with outdated answers, now it'll just get worse

Tried few times to use stack overflow as a user, could never gain enough points to post, answer or contribute... so I deleted my account also several times...

I'm new to SO and programming as such and a genuine question which I didn't see anywhere and then the questionnaires to post a question was so overwhelming and still it wouldn't let me post the question. It won't let me comment to anyone's answers and won't let me uptick it. Basically can't do much other than read it for now. So those newbies like me have no part in it. Sorry SO state.

This video rings true for every site on Stack Exchange. I am not a developer, and I don't even know the first thing about coding, but I have asked questions on other sites in Stack Exchange, and have either received incredibly impolite responses, or the topic was closed for no apparent reason. I left that site long ago for this very reason.

This is a very shortsighted move by both companies: There will be always a need for a community of programmers that help each other, providing new solutions to new problems. This way they're both hurting each other for a quick short-term advantage. That's simply dumb.

Its been years since i used stackoverflow. I normally need to use it when I'm learning something new, they say most of the questions have already been answered. But some of the questions are related to older versions - and your question even though you state is different to others due to the api changes etc... is marked as a duplicate to an old question. I've now just relied various forums, and unfortunately AI's.

Quite frankly I am glad to see stack overflow. I have tried to use stack overflow in the past asking questions as a new developer. The responses where less than helpful but more importantly most where rude and condescending.

Deleted my profile long ago, every question to them is "opiniated", its supposed to be a fucking community

What was that intro hahahahaha

I don't know how to feel about this. On one hand, I hate that SO is profiting off the work of thousands of people, on the other hand, SO users are condescending and can F off.

Thanks for creating this video. SO is biting the hands that feeds them.

I haven't used SO for God knows how long. It never solved my problems when I could just google more atomic problems from my well-defined problem and build upwards instead. Way faster than SO ever were. It had a place when I started out, but honestly, now it can just go shit bricks when RU-vid itself solves that issue by giving new devs a lot of info. Wish I had that when I started out 20 years ago.

"I had to let them finish, it's rude to interrupt"... Exactly what I do when I politely ask co-pilot "Can you please..." or "Thanks, but instead I would like...". Being polite with "someone" I know it's neither human nor conscious. Old habits die hard.

Stack Overflow is dead since strange reviewers (middle aged mostly teachers with an 'infinite' wisdom) made a gamification on downvoting legit answers

One question, what dud the ros you " signed" when you signed up to the site ( and any tos opdate you got while a member) say about data ownership and use

I can't remember the last time I visited SO. Documentation and LLMs are the way to go, especially for beginners. SO was extremely toxic to beginners

Stack overflow help me to clear my final year project . It is one of the best community to get best answers with details.

I've largely transitioned from being Google first to AI first regarding tech questions. Either of the premium versions of the two main models are probably worth the money in terms of the time they save as long as you approach them with a modicum of self-awareness (yes, knowing when to say, "Actually, a training course would be better," matters).

Damn, you’re becoming more and more entertaining 😂 Amazing transformation!

Who will feed the AIs once all such platforms are gone?😮

Is this the Reddit blackout version for coders?

I actually have little issue with them banning people whatsoever given the intent of the site, which is to provide answers to questions. But I don't hold the common moral view, at all. I don't think people can own information, even about themselves. This isn't to say I think people are morally correct to share things that people want to keep confidential. Of course not, but answers on stack overflow are clearly not held in any kind of confidence. The information was always public, the whole purpose of the answer is helped by the answer being public, and it being included in training only increases the value. So no, I don't take issues with what they did. Consent is not required to view or read something posted publicly. It's ridiculous to assert such a weird made up thing, which we only perceive as fair now that the models work. Nobody was complaining about the fact that training was always going to need to do this when they had no idea whether it would work. Nobody was making any effort to develop contracts or agreements to ensure their data wasn't shared. We all joined an open net, and joined social media, the most public thing that has ever existed. People like to feel like they care about this but they really don't. They'll keep using the free services over the long run.

if Ai is trained on stack overflow then why do we need stack overflow after this? lol

Dis gonna be gud. Imagine ChatGPT mass producing advice along the lines of "Instead of doing what you are trying to do, you should instead do that other way cooler thing".

It's probably in the T&C when you create an account that they can use your data. Still shitty on Stack Overflow side.

I don't get it. If you put something on the public internet that any one (or any bot) can see. I don't see how you can object to a computer reading something on the public internet?

Days? I have found things on there that went unanswered for years. Same issues that I have found, and no answers after 8 years or more.

I don’t understand? Isn’t the data on stack overflow already public??

SO has fulfilled its purpose. Successor of SO will have to be built on top of AI, not away from it.

Alex, they've always operated this way. I called it out during a similar issue was happening years ago and was told not use the platform if I didnt like it by a very senior SO person. (I have the receipts if you wanna see it)

Closed! I just felt like it

I didn't know ChatGPT had a voice. I wonder how it would read code or ASCII art...

This was probably the best move for the SO owners. People were already leaving SO in mass and they didn't have the knowledge to develop their own LLM that could compete with chatGPT. The old guard may not like it but they were also the reason people left.

Deviant Art tried the same opt-in users in silently

wasnt gpt 3.5 already trained on stackoverflow scrapings? I dont get the partnership

I guess there is a high probability that ChatGPT will start to tell users that their question is a duplicate and it needs to be closed

I have never answered questions in SO because of the draconian requirements to post

It's cute that these users think deleting their answers from the public site mean they don't still have copies lol

all stack overflow had to do is stop being asshole to their users or promote a culture to stop user being asshole to each other. would of solve many of these problem now. But they were too high on their horse thinking new user can take it or leave it. Get what's coming to them.

Good to keep a human constructed database. We do not yet know the failure pathways of AI in its short and medium term applications. There are always unanticipated downsides of any new technology.

The people that go "erm, my answers are licensed under CC BY-SA, and AI doesn't provide attribution" should look up how code almost didn't get copyright protection, because it was believed that it was too technical and "standardized" to allow for different expressions of the same idea. Take Duff's device, or the fast inverse square root code. There's only one way to express these ideas, so that expression can't have copyright protection. Now, if you're copying the substantial structure of a larger code base, then sure, now that's copyright infringement, but... I don't think you could fit enough original code to be eligible for copyright protection into a SO answer. The non-code answer may be a different story, but unless it's copied verbatim, or just slightly rephrased (which shouldn't happen, since AIs should avoid overfitting), there's no plagiarism either.

I mean, if they really wanted to integrate AI in a positive way for StackOverflow as a whole, they could have trained a bot in SO questions so it can identify potential duplicates and suggest them in the comments (not the answers, the comments under the question), asking politely the person who submitted the question whether those related questions solved their issue or not; and if the user says yes _then_ it marks the question as duplicate and posts the link to the original. On top of that, they could block the ability of human users to close questions as duplicate for up to a week or two and forbid users from making such remarks in answers and comments, delegating the responsibility exclusively to the bot during that initial time frame. Hopefully, this should decrease the hostility with the "Question duplicated. Get out." responses, but also what's important here is that they let _people_ answer the questions. The human factor is key when it comes to knowledge, and it should be upheld and protected at all costs. Let AI bots help with the janitor work, as they can be infinitely patient unlike people, specially when they're not getting paid for it.

I would be ok with SO being used to train OpenAI if they also allowed any other Open Source AIs to train on it (which OpenAI is not, they are closed source to the core and lobby to ban open source LLMs).

But SO has had their data available to the public for years either via their API or you can download it in bulk. The API data is always available, but the bulk data for the current year is available at the end of the year. But anyways, I forgot the license there, but it’s there. So what about people who just download it and use it for other uses? Where is the outrage there because there are hundreds of websites that do that all the time violating the license.

I love the tears. Every question is inarticulate. Every response misses the underlying intention. I gave up on it a long time ago, yet somehow it became a repo of knowledge? But hey, a green check mark is all I need.

My concern is what happens when nobody contributes new solutions to new problems? LLM cannot help with novel problems so they too have a shelf life.

Deleted my profile at SO. Bye bye.

Someone needs to develop a Don Rickles AI that makes fun of the user whenever they ask a question. :-)

I Think stack overflow was afraid to loss users in benefits of chatgpt but more people start to come back to stack overflow after chatgpt start to failing more answer

SO's terms were that user provided content was provided on an unconditional and royalty free basis. How else were SO ever going to earn revenue to actually provide the service (regardless of profitability, costs need to be covered). Also, the terms prevent users from revoking access the answers, so rather than ban people they just continue to keep that in the training data sets, even if it's no longer visible on SO. Whatever, SO can't really compete in the short term, and LLM's will degrade as tech develops and there is no data set for them to effectively train on. Ultimately I think that SO's future is to provide the reinforcement by human feedback to LLM's, so they both benefit (and devs too). A lot of people will be sad to see SO die because they put in effort contributing because it's a way of communicating a skill set (recruiters looking at SO status as a guide to experience).

Stack overflow when i first started was great for finding answers but if you are new sometimes the folks there can be a bit mean 😢

I do think the knowledge accumulated by stackoverflow should be put to use, no point in keeping that treasure locked away from AI.

This sounds just like trying to use EEVBlog. A bunch of know it alls telling you not to ask questions and dying to pick fights.

Just like politicians, everyone has a price that makes crossing the line appealing.

A thank you for making me laugh so hard!! Intro is priceless!

Feels like Reddit all over again with their Apollo fallout.

Your demo of OpenAI having better morals than StackOverflow is priceless.

If StackOverflow goes away - where does ChatGPT get new data to train on?

I feel like we've been here before with UGC user revolt.

SO is circling the drain. They have very rude people there. So for me if it isn't chatgpt I'd use geekforgeeks instead. The answers are not as direct as SO but at least they're not rude.

I think Stack Overflow needed a reset anyway maybe something new comes in. Let me be clear I'm not against AI using public posted stuff the problem for me is it gets exclusive sold. I think when stack overflow and similar sites would make a monthly torrent blob for people who are interested. It would have much less complains. The core problem with the sites is how duplicated question are handed there a 2 reasons: Google became really bad in finding specific topic the chance you miss something is really high , the reasons is lot of the answers became outdated because they are many many years old.

I always used stack overflow, but I never asked questions in it, now I dont have to worry about it i guess.

I'm an older software engineer who managed to help a few people on SO occasionally, so I gained an okay reputation on SO (nothing fantastic, but enough that I think people think twice before down-voting me... although some will still down-vote me). I rarely ask questions directly on SO, but use it primarily through Google, in that Google sends me to SO when I perform a search for answers to a particular subject. If an SO answer shows up, I examine it for relevancy and maybe benefit. Sometimes, the answer is close, but someone else's answer helps me. Sometimes, I contribute an answer when I see the existing answers are just slightly off or something. The few times I ever asked a question were out of sheer desperation, and I have *never* gained an answer in time to help me ... most of the time, I never get an answer. But, at least, my questions are not down-voted, maybe because of a combination of my reputation, and the sheer detail I give in the question. If I were a less experienced engineer asking a question, though, I would likely not even know how to ask a question that someone else could answer. It really is a skill. And SO does an extremely bad job of helping budding engineers learn how to ask questions in a way that an experienced engineer can help answer (hint: its always about the details... the more details you add, the more an engineer can help you find an answer... and the greater the chance that you'll figure out the answer on your own without actually posting the question, amusingly). I've also occasionally provided answers or friendly comments to down-voted questions, knowing that a lot of SO down-voters are jerks.

Guess the SO managers never saw this sketch with John Cleese and Marty Feldman... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZYlOV7K-xOU.html The SO managers, who could have done something long ago, countenanced "defecating in their own nest" by "early adopter gannets" (read: "hi-rep users")... (Sadly, this recording does not include the line: "gannets soil their nest". Those who've heard the audio version (record?) will know what I'm referring to.) RIP Stackoverflow. (BTW: this schadenfreude you've served up is simply delectable!!)

re lack of emotions but can simulate emotional intelligence: ChatGPT and other LLM's have values in their state that correspond to things we would label with words for moods and emotions. Pausing the program after the prompt has been processed and before the answer is generated, changing these values and then continuing, causes the output to reflect the corresponding mood or emotion. So, Transformers have some state that is affected by the emotional charge or mood of what you say to it, and its output is affected by this state. Therefore, it's fair to say that the A.I. has _quasi-emotions_ .

Those of us who post the stack overflow don't have any ownership or copyright to our posts. The old saying, "if you don't pay anything, you're the product" applies. So I don't see anything wrong, or even unethical with what Stack Overflow is doing.

whats wrong with giving the data to open Ai?

I support SO's actions. Whenever we post on a public forum like SO, we have already consented for anyone to use our post without restriction, so it's silly, even hypocritical, to suddenly feel entitled to restrictions after the fact. LLMs allow me to get pseudo-SO answers more quickly and with less toxicity. Yes, it's also lower quality and contains more misinformation, but when these are a problem, I can still use SO so I've lost nothing. I think LLMs can benefit SO because it can take care of the silly questions, leaving SO with the good stuff.

If chatgpt finds that a question is a duplicate, why can’t it be helpful and provide links ?

It's sad...

What about wikipedia?

That's A Stupid Question! Closed!

I think we should "delve" in this more, clearly we need to "delve" into the implications of this for centuries!

SO used to be good. But in recent years most of the answers are: “That’s only relevant today, therefore it’s a bad question. CLOSED.”

Stack Overflow is basically a place where people with low social self-esteem go to make themselves feel better by condescendingly answering technical questions. Tried it twice, cringe, LLM's all the way.

Stack of chad overflow.

One can also provide purposefully misleading answers on SO to ruin its value as training data. Now I know nobody would do such a thing... but just a thought. :)

Github and Stack Overflow should get together with AI...............Oh they have and it's called Skynet.

first they came for the article writers, it was not my business so i said nothing. then they came for the artists but it was none of my business so i said nothing then they came for the coders and there was no one left to stand up for us so nobody said anything

I generally avoid visiting sites with AI suggestions.

With no SO, what will feed the AI monster.

I thought programmers are the people who welcomes AI. I'm totally fine for openai to use my answers on so.

Maybe through AI we will finally discover how to center a div.

I remember i made an account to help some poeple on it that had a problem and nobody seems know how to fix it i knew the fix... And i never got to post it! Why i need to make 10 posts before i can post wel fuck SO and sorry for others (bet there are a lot who have run in this problem many fixes never fixed) thanks to SO dum as IT staff

that's sad. many people shared their knowledge with others and now SO is just monetizing it by brute force.

What if we start to poison the data? Like we post a bunch of answers that look right to an unexperienced used, and we upvote those a lot.