Stack Overflow contributors are not happy about a deal that will provide OpenAI with access to the vast trove of technical information posted to the popular forum.Per the new agreement, announced earlier this week, OpenAI will connect to the Overflow API to surface Stack Overflow content in ChatGPT answers and use the data for AI model training. The news comes after Stack Overflow laid off staff en masse last fall over the threat of chatbots siphoning away its users. And as Tom’s Hardware reports, that’s not going over well with Stack Overflow contributors.”I feel violated, cheated upon, betrayed, and exploited,” Stack Overflow contributor Christian Hujer writes on a discussion thread started by a Stack Overflow employee named Rosie. “This whole thing feels ethically wrong and emotionally damaging. Humans are meant to exploit machines, not the other way round.”Some contributors are attempting to poison the API by editing their posts with protest messages. On Mastodon, user @Ben shared a screenshot of how he edited his most popular post with the title, “Why does OpenAI get to profit from our work?” He then received an email from Stack Overflow moderators who reverted the change and suspended his account for seven days. Another user, @Alexander, commented that they attempted to do the same, but Stack Overflow also rolled back the changes. “I guess tech bros violating consent shouldn’t really surprise me, but still,” says Alexander. Contributors in the EU area wondering if local GDPR data protections can help exclude their work from being passed on to OpenAI.The attribution of their Stack Overflow responses is of particular concern. “Will it cite Stack Overflow in general? The specific post? The specific user?” another contributor responded.OpenAI says it will link back to the post, but ChatGPT has a history of not doing so, as PCMag called out in our review last summer. In March, OpenAI made links more prominent, presumably to sweeten the deal for its growing list of content-licensing partnerships, which also includes publications like The Financial Times. However, those changes only apply to the paid versions of ChatGPT, such as ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise. The free version does not serve up sources unless the user explicitly asks for them.Stack Overflow contributors are also asking how the deal interacts with the Creative Commons licensing law under which all Stack Overflow posts fall. Dubbed Creative Commons 4.0, or CC BY-SA 4.0, it requires those who use the content to attribute the source. Stack Overflow’s terms of service acknowledge these protections but also note that contributors “willingly give up some rights and control over such content,” including the “right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display, and to commercially exploit” their work.”What did you expect from a centralized platform? They will monetize all of your content without thinking twice,” one person writes on a Hacker News discussion.
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“Do we—individually or collectively—have no claim to (part of) such proceeds?” says one Stack Overflow user. The concerns echo those of artists, writers, comedians, and other creatives who have sounded the alarm on AI profiting off their work since ChatGPT’s November 2022 debut. AI systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Meta AI scrape the web for content to surface in its text and image responses without compensating creators.In response to these lawsuits, OpenAI debuted a way for content creators to exclude their works from its models via a simple form submission. Most major news sites have blocked OpenAI from crawling its articles by adding it to their robots.txt.These primitive solutions have failed to abate ongoing copyright concerns, so this week OpenAI announced a more sophisticated solution coming in 2025. Dubbed Media Manager, the tool “will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.”The Media Manager announcement mentioned its growing list of content licensing deals, which it says will “empower creators and publishers” while enhancing the ChatGPT user experience.
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