It seems that developers are not too pleased with the recently announced partnership between the popular question-and-answer platform for developers, Stack Overflow, and OpenAI. Part of the partnership aims to improve ChatGPT’s technical knowledge. Particularly, OpenAI will use the Q&A platform’s content and feedback to train its AI models.
This development hasn’t been met with much enthusiasm. Developers are taking to social media to question the move and express their views. A quick look at the engagement on the announcement post on X (formerly Twitter) shows what most of the developer community thinks of the partnership.
There has been a consensus of users taking a stand against what they view as an “exploitative move” from AI companies.
“It’s just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It’s just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model, and sold back to you,” one developer remarks on Mastadon.
Consequently, some angry users are taking matters into their own hands and deleting their posts from the forum to prevent OpenAI from scrapping this data. Since Stack Overflow prevents users from deleting accepted answers, some are editing their answers.
In response, Stack Overflow is banning from the site users who try to remove or edit posts on the platform. In addition, the site’s moderators are restoring any edited or removed content from the site.
ChatGPT allows users to opt out of training – OpenAI won’t use your content to train its AI models. However, we’re not sure if such a tool will be implemented for Stack Overflow users given the recent sentiments.
