I gave my time and expertise to StackOverflow because it was licensed CC-BY-SA | Hacker News Reader

I gave my time and expertise to StackOverflow because it was licensed CC-BY-SA

aus.social

75 pointsluu32 comments

> It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI. Just because OpenAI charges $20 a month? It takes a lot of electricity to produce results from AI. Just seems shortsighted on flimsy principle. If it were me I'd wait for the lawyers to sort out what SO and OpenAI are doing with CC-By-SA instead of making a big stand about it on the internet, but I can sort of get it I guess.

Edit: I called it flimsy principle because it's not clear that CC-By-SA prevents this until the court rules

> I don't understand why they would want to remove their code instead of wanting it to live on and further help more people through AI.

They do explain that in the post: because of the missing reciprocity. They didn't do it so OpenAI could profit off other's work, but to build a community with others. It's a pretty common motivator for humans.

How does removing their code help anyone? It barely makes the tineist bit of difference to Open AI, if any that's detectable. They aren't the only one's helping with that kind of code. "But it's the principle of the thing." Ok, well if it makes you feel good but that kind of self-centeredness belies your stated desire to help people.

edit: I think what bothers me is it seems like a Luddite reaction of someone who resents progress they don't approve of and want no part of it

> How does removing their code help anyone?

The same way protesting anything helps anyone. It draws attention to a problem and, if the protest is visible enough, leads to positive change.

I want to say that there’s a missing component that a lot of people miss when it comes to protest. Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care. The goal of protest isn’t visibility , it’s to convince a target into doing what you want, where visibility is used as a tool to embarrass the target into submission. If the target has no shame, then you can protest all you want, they won’t care.

In the 1960s If the US wasn’t in a cold war and didn’t care that they were perceived as racists , The Civil Rights Movement would probably have to moved towards the Malcom X direction than Kings.

>Visibility means nothing if target doesn’t care.

Sounds like it's just that the deal has changed, so they don't like the new deal and have decided to opt out.

If it's a public good, then it's a public good. So whoever wants to use it according to the license it's fine.

If something is produced where the author is upset afterwards when this good is not used in the way he/she intended to, than it's the problem of the author in the first place to have choosen the wrong license.

OpenAI is not the only one producing models from SO data. There are open models doing so as well

OpenAI says you can’t use the output to compete with them. That’s why everyone should cancel their blessed subscription and switch to Mistral or Groq. Same issue with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Inflection, Meta, and xAI, all are literal cowards who would learn from others without permission then forbid others from learning from them

Really? Isn’t that sort of insane considering the corpus they train their models on?

Creative Commons as a license basically says "if copyright says you need permission to do something, you can do it, subject to these conditions". If training is fair use then Creative Commons explicitly does not restrict AI training, period. If it's not fair use then the model authors have to provide proper attribution and a CC-BY-SA license declaration on their model.

For billions of text posts. Good luck. With that.

On the surface Creative Commons licenses are "AI-friendly" - in that they exist to opt-out of parts of copyright protection - but in practice AI goes against the spirit of Creative Commons so heavily that actually complying with it is impossible. If your attribution string requires its own search engine, maybe it's not effective attribution?

For the record I don't think training is going to be fair use. The AI model you're training is usurping the market for new art/writing/etc, and there's a clear chain of provenance from the training data to the final model and specific outputs (in at least some cases, e.g. "draw a 1970s scifi robot" giving you C3PO).

I think a explicit AI-hostile / AI non-friendly license is needed which explicitly denies work being trained on. For the small minority who do not wish to feed the LLM, shortsighted maybe but I can see a group of people who are all for source available but not for AI.

I imagine most licenses that are AI restrictive indirectly can potentially be circumvented.

Edit: looks like there already is https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

The problem is that AI is making use of the Fair Use exception. They don't need to follow the license - fair use means they can just ignore it!

i think the bigger problem folks have is these ai tools charge a premium for data which was consumed from publicly open websites, where folks originally contributed their knowledge with the belief that others could access the information as-is (paraphrased or what have you)- without being charged a fee

cost has always been an issue, from bandwidth to storage to system maint, to electricity - the bills gotta get paid somehow; its not like websites are gov funded to keep those 9's happy

Licenses can strip you of your fair use rights. In fact, it's common practice to take away fair use even for really weak licenses (e.g. D&D's OGL 1.1, a license to do nothing). Creative Commons has to have an explicit clause stating that any fair use is allowed regardless of the other clauses of the license just to not be interpreted as a restriction of fair use.

Whether we should be stripping people of their free speech rights[0] to stop a parasitic enclosure of the commons that might sidestep existing copyright law, which is being cheered on by the proprietary world, is another question. Copyright law as it currently stands does not and cannot protect artists against AI that is going to salami slice tiny bits of statistical data from their work and mix it with hundreds of other slices to form a new image. That sort of harm is difficult to prosecute even if I personally think it's Not Fair Use. So adding a NoAI clause to Creative Commons would mainly serve to add a bunch of new incompatible licenses, and argumentation over whether or not this is Free Culture.

The correct way to stop generative AI is with collective action, not individual action, because the harm is to the whole class of artists, not a single artist. There is no "collective copyright" that would allow regulation or prohibition of generative AI.

[0] Under US law, fair use is the projection of the 1st Amendment into copyright law.

Is creative commons viral? If not, I'm guessing that around now a lot of people are repenting and wishing they had listened to RMS et al.

Creative Commons isn't one license, it's six. There's a handful of clauses that can be mixed and matched to form a license:

* BY: Attribution requirement, every CC license has this

* SA: Share-alike, aka "copyleft", RMS-style "virality"[0] but without a source code requirement since that is impractical outside of software.

* NC: NonCommercial, license only covers not-for-profit usecases and filesharing

* ND: License does not allow derivative works

These can be combined like so:

* CC-BY

* CC-BY-SA <- This one was used by StackOverflow!

* CC-BY-ND

* CC-BY-NC

* CC-BY-NC-SA

* CC-BY-NC-ND

Only the first two are "RMS compatible" licenses.

[0] Copyright is already viral, share-alike/copyleft clauses just patch the virus to attack itself. It's the "treating your leukemia with HIV" of licensing.

> without a source code requirement since that is impractical outside of software.

Preferred form for editing is practical for any content that is edited in digital form; if it is impractical at all, its for works where editing is done to some non-digital artifact which is then digitized, and where the norm for further modifications would be the same, and where the digital form is itself not renderable back into the artifact. But I can't think of any real examples.

Thank you!

That's how I, NAL, read "share-alike": derivative work needs to be shared again instead of walled off.

In which case they can't stop people using the outputs of their LLMs to create new ones. But I guess it'll need to be decided in court, and their plan is to achieve dominance (or enough of a lead to guarantee it, which is the same thing) before others start trying.

Also read recently that Stack Overflow business traffic is down over 50% after chat gpt release. Doesn't seem that any of the upset people think about destiny of Stack Overflow itself... which is a little sad.

Once upon a time I used to live in libraries to make any kind of progress on certain problems. Then Google arrived and my library visits reduced drastically. Yet libraries still stand. And I still head there whenever I need some peace and quite. Something like that will happen with StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Quora,Reddit and even HN.

The difference ist that libraries are vaults of knowledge usually operated by governments to ensure access to the public.

Of all the examples you named only Wikipedia has a mission that is comparable to a library.

All the others will probably perish and exist as datasets you can buy, just like some social networks of yore.

To what extent did Stack Overflow think about destiny of Stack Overflow?

Additionally it’s wild they think their content hadn’t already been scraped and trained on.

They were fine with humans training on this data and selling their expertise to employers, but they’re not fine with a higher order way to consume their contribution and are removing it so smaller open source competitors to open ai can’t train on the same data openai trained on.

StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297027

Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40302792

I don't know when it was most recently changed, but...

"and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you"

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public

This content isn't licensed under CC-BY-SA to stackoverflow, it carries additional riders which grant SO the legal right to sell it however they please.

Those are fairly cookie-cutter clauses. Imagine trying to operate a website serving user-submitted content without those rights - it can't be done.

Interestingly, the one commonly-seen phrase missing here is "sublicense". IANAL, but it seems they aren't allowed to just sell it to whoever they want. Perhaps their deal with OpenAI just completely ignores this (their business hinges on training being fair use anyways) and what they are actually selling is convenient API access?

Isn’t this an obvious GDPR violation to say users can’t remove content? Maybe Stack Overflow is setting themselves up for a massive civil penalty in the order of many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for denying European citizens their right to remove their data from the platform

I see nothing here that indicates a person has the right to have Stack Overflow answers deleted: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-be-forgotten/

First, I don't see how or why an answer would be considered "personal" data that is subject to this regulation at all. As far as I'm aware, that means data about yourself, not every piece of information about everything you have ever committed to public record. Second, Stack Overflow pretty clearly serves an informational purpose in the public interest that would be impeded if answers get deleted, which specifically makes it exempt.

The same thing goes for Europeans thinking Hacker News needs to let you delete comment history. If you say more than you intended in a specific instance, giving away information that can be used to identify you, you can ask to have that deleted and they will do it. In fact, I've done that myself. If you ask to have your entire comment history deleted, they do not have to do that.

This whole ordeal reminds me that I actually do need to go back and clean up and edit all my stack exchange posts.

Not because I want to protest but because they are bad. Even highly upvoted and accepted answers of mine are pretty poor quality, don’t give the best advice, and in some cases provide misinformation. I am very sure I instructed people on how to make Frankendebian in more than one answer. And I can’t be unique in this regard.

Just scraping Stack Exchange without someone reviewing what that information actually is, is going to actively feed bad information into the model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com