Stack Overflow subscribers rebel over OpenAI deal

Reverse ferret on GenAI hasn’t gone down well with developers

The recently announced partnership between Stack Overflow and OpenAI is going down badly with users of the public facing part of the platform.

The deal involves OverflowAI which Stack Overflow, the knowledge sharing platform for engineers and developers, launched last July. That announcement essentially set out a roadmap for the integration of GenAI into the public Stack Overflow platform and the private Stack Overflow for Teams.

The partnership means that posts on the forum will be used to train ChatGPT – and the posters aren't happy about it. They way many developers view it, the knowledge that they have shared will be scraped from Stack Overflow and sold back to them.

When OverflowAI was announced last year, the company said:

"Our aim is to stay true to the original promise of Stack Overflow, keeping our developer community at the center, ensuring that trust and attribution are at the core of what we build, and that the people who contribute their knowledge are recognized for their efforts."

However, Stack Overflow subscribers posting on sites like Mastodon and X clearly aren't convinced that this is happening. Users are complaining that when they are delete or edit previous answers to try and stop them being used to train the OpenAI model, posts are being changed back and the subscriber made the subject of a short ban.

A programmer named Ben posted a screenshot yesterday on Mastodon of the change history of a post where he had tried to protest the OpenAI deal.

"Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest rated answers.

"Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove that knowledge from the community.

"So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

"Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days."

A moderator message Ben also included says that Stack Overflow posts become "part of the collective efforts" of other contributors once made and that they should only be removed "under extraordinary circumstances."

Suffice to say, this hasn't gone down well with the developer community.

Users are invoking the EU GDPR, stating that they have the right to delete their own content through the "right to forget," and have any data about them removed at their request. However, it seems Stack Overflow users signed that right away when they subscribed to the site. Terms of Service contains a clause which states Stack Overflow's irrevocable ownership of all content subscribers provide to the site.

When the partnership was announced on Monday, OpenAI said that ChatGPT would include citations in answers to developer questions when they'd been sourced from the platform, as will users of Gemini for Google Cloud – a partnership announced earlier this year. But it's the lack of transparency which troubles users. Basically, there will be no way of future posers of questions knowing whether the chatbot has cited an answer correctly or fully.

The indignation of Stack Overflow subscribers has also been fuelled by the fact that the company has had, up until very recently, a policy preventing the use of GenAI in answering any questions posed on the site. Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI-detection software when reviewing posts.