StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI

Any content you post on Stack Overflow is licensed (by you) as CC BY-SA [1]. Which is fantastic! Your answer can be freely (with attribution) used elsewhere. Admittedly, the main use has historically been clone websites that just add adverts with no value. But the principle is there.<p>But if anyone has a license to use your content... Then certainly Stack Overflow do! If they want to post an old version of your question&#x2F;answer that hasn&#x27;t been overwritten with a message about some cause you care about, important as it may be to you, then they&#x27;re free to do that. This is not news.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;licensing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;licensing</a>

Regarding this title:<p>The user didn&#x27;t delete answers, they updated them to say something unrelated to the question. I understand the protest, but there&#x27;s a difference between deleting and what&#x27;s essentially defacing.

<i>Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.<p>So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.<p>Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.</i><p>How about repeatedly changing just a few characters, corrupting the post over a period of time? (Entrepreneurs: you can have &quot;SO post gradual corruption as a service&quot; for free, you&#x27;re welcome)

It’s sad to see the death pangs of one of the most useful resources of my career.

Since the content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, the solution is to wait until OpenAI eat the content, and ask them to attribute the copyright to you when they create derivative work (e.g. OpenAI models).<p>Seems fair, and provides back the credit to the person who prepared the answer.

&gt; As a result, they have started suspending accounts that engage in this behavior. It&#x27;s important to note that the &quot;right to forget&quot; no longer applies to your answers, as per StackOverflow&#x27;s Terms and Conditions, which grant them special permission to retain all answers.<p>SO can actually do this?<p>I was surprised by this partnership to be honest, but I don’t blame contributors picking a side on this. SO is merely a provider of infrastructure, but the way that OpenAI wants to monetise people only benefits them and SO directly.

What did you expect from a centralized platform? They will monetize all of your content without thinking twice

More individuals are increasingly recognizing that we are currently in a medieval era of the Internet. The content and creations we share online today are essentially not entirely our own. Many are eagerly awaiting a transformative moment akin to the French Revolution to rectify this situation.

Here&#x27;s a cached copy of the linked post on a server with more capacity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@ben@m.benui.ca" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@ben@m.benui.ca</a>

Not sure exactly what this protest is for, questions and answers both published publicly and anyone can see them without an account and benefit from it.<p>Alright, if they use it to train some AI - what is the big deal? As I understand the original posts are still accessable. Essentially users will be paying for faster search and better precision since you can do the same without payed AI.

Would there be all this Sturm und Drang if the LLM models generated from stack overflow (and other) content were considered a social good and available at no cost? Or perhaps the turmoil comes from the fact that somebody else is making profits with no oversight, and it&#x27;s not really about the LLM mechanism and toolchain itself.

I&#x27;m sure people will remember that when next minded to answer a question on SO.

So I totally get that people are upset, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that SO was on the path towards going out of business.<p>If they didn’t change <i>something</i> they would simply cease to exist. Does anyone have a better idea?

I don&#x27;t get this self-entitlement... It sounds so childish. The same users erasing posts have used knowledge on SO to do their jobs, therefore profiting from it. Now SO will profit from it, and so will OpenAI, as they should.<p>Also, answers are edotsble by other users, so you don&#x27;t own them after you post them.

Must be fun working at StackOverflow with a gun held to your head now that OAI ate your lunch.

&gt; It&#x27;s just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit.<p>Let&#x27;s be honest, your answers on StackOverflow was never _not_ used for profit.

Preventing people from deleting all their answers has long been the policy; this is nothing new.<p>And before anyone brings it up: GDPR does not mean &quot;every single bit of information I ever wrote can be deleted whenever I want&quot;. Not on HN, and certainly not on Stack Overflow where you agreed to have everything under the CC license. It&#x27;s painful how badly some people understand the GDPR.

It&#x27;s nice to see all that effort by the many being monetized by the few so that the many can be off loaded making more money for the few.<p>Well played, well played.<p>Strange game: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uOoXwxqeVzg</a>

web2.0 was about user generated content.<p>i would say this is the so-far elusive web3.0

No more answering questions on StackOverflow, then -- easy peasy.

Wow,Thats unfair

Title is a little misleading. Regardless of one&#x27;s opinion on StackOverflow&#x27;s partnership with OpenAI, editing existing questions &amp; answers to replace them with protest messages fully fits their rules&#x27; definition of defacing.<p>Editing the answers through SO&#x27;s tools is not the right way to protest (since it&#x27;s trivial for them to suspend you because you&#x27;re clearly violating their rules); the GDPR is. Making a GDPR deletion request is quite easy.

This is where GDPR and friends should come in. If they won&#x27;t do it the friendly way, they should do it the hard way.<p>Lawyers are a little more expensive than handling a click, especially at scale.

lol, I hope Mr. Altman finds my 10 year old posts relevant

This is just ignorant;<p>Surprise your content is publicly available and used by a company for profit \o&#x2F;<p>Srsly... your QA was used in GPT before this agreement already now SO profits from it which makes it in theory better because now SO (the platform you liked before this) is able to continue investing into it and making money &#x2F; profit which motivates them to keep investing and inovating.<p>Why tf is this a bad thing?

Why would OpenAI even need to partner with SO? Scraping is free.<p>Just shows how much money OpenAI has to spend when they could have got it for free.

At some level, I feel like the guy is an extremist with his opposition to OpenAI and AI in general. But it could be that he is on the right, that we are slowly creating a successor species, and that we are not reacting with enough force because of our cultural inertia.