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

lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 586 points –
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT
tomshardware.com
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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.

That SA part needs to be tested in court against the AI models themselves

A lot of this shittiness would probably go away if there was a risk that ingesting certain content would mean you need to release the actual model to the public.

Yeah, their assumption though is you don't? Neither attribution nor sharealike, not even full-on all-rights-reserved copyright is being respected. Anything public goes and if questions are asked it's "fair use". If the user retains CC BY-SA over their content, why is giving a bunch of money to StackOverflow entitling OpenAI to use it all under whatever terms they settled on? Boggles me.

Now, say, Reddit Terms of Service state clearly that by submitting content you are giving them the right to "a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness (...) in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world." Speaks volumes on why alternatives (like Lemmy) to these platforms matter.

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