Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI have announced a new API partnership that will integrate technical content from Stack Overflow with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. The deal sparked controversy within the Stack Overflow user community, with many expressing anger and protest over their content being used to support and train AI models.
“I hate this. I’m just going to delete/downgrade my answers one by one,” one user wrote on sister site Stack Exchange. “I don’t care if this goes against your stupid policies, because as this announcement shows, your policies can change at any time without prior consultation with your stakeholders. You don’t care about your users, I don’t care about you.
Stack Overflow is a popular question and answer site for software developers that allows users to ask and answer technical questions related to coding. The site has a large community of developers who contribute their knowledge and expertise to help others solve programming problems. Over the past decade, Stack Overflow has become a widely used resource for many developers looking for solutions to common coding challenges.
As part of the announced partnership, OpenAI will use Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI product to improve its AI models using content from the Stack Overflow community, officially incorporating information that many believe has previously been culled without a license. OpenAI will also surface validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly in ChatGPT, giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers who have contributed to the platform. has been training Stack Overflow for 15 years.” » according to Stack Overflow.
In return, OpenAI plans to provide attribution to the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT, but exactly how the company will do this is unclear. Stack Overflow will also use OpenAI technology in its development of OverflowAI, an AI model announced in July 2023 that uses an LLM to provide answers to developer questions.
While companies tout the benefits of collaboration, many Stack Overflow users have expressed their displeasure with the agreement. This is especially true considering that until very recently, Stack Overflow seemed to take a negative stance towards generative AI in general, banning responses written using ChatGPT. It was also widely reported last year that ChatGPT’s popularity had significantly reduced Stack Overflow traffic, although the company later appeared to refute this, claiming faulty third-party analysis.
Since the announcement, some users have attempted to edit or delete their Stack Overflow posts in protest, arguing that the move steals the work of those who have contributed to the platform without the ability to unsubscribe. In retaliation, Stack Overflow staff reportedly banned these users while deleting or reinstating the protest posts. On Monday, a Stack Overflow user named Ben took to Mastodon to share his experience of being suspended after posting a protest message:
Stack Overflow moderators said that once posts are published, they “are part of the collective efforts” of other contributors and should only be removed in extraordinary circumstances, according to The Verge. Stack Overflow’s Terms of Service also state that users cannot revoke Stack Overflow’s permission to use content they have contributed.
Although Stack Overflow owns user posts, the site uses a Creative Commons 4.0 license which requires attribution. We’ll see if the ChatGPT integrations, which have yet to be deployed, will honor this license to the satisfaction of disgruntled Stack Overflow users. For now, the battle continues.
This story was originally published on Ars Technica.
