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Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

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Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#4

Post by kbelder »

Per https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing:

    As noted in the Stack Exchange Terms of Service and in the footer of every page, all publicly accessible user 
    contributions are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as follows:

    Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5.
    Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0.
    Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#6

Post by CharlesW »

avmich wrote: post #2

The data on Stack Overflow servers provided by users isn't really Stack Overflow's data.

"You agree that any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or source code, audio and video, animations, and product feedback (collectively, “Content”) that you provide to the public Network (collectively, “Subscriber Content”), is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC BY-SA 4.0), and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit…" https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#7

Post by disntthinkthis »

CharlesW wrote: post #6
avmich wrote: post #2

The data on Stack Overflow servers provided by users isn't really Stack Overflow's data.

"You agree that any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or source code, audio and video, animations, and product feedback (collectively, “Content”) that you provide to the public Network (collectively, “Subscriber Content”), is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclus…

Except that Stack Overflow’s CEO, in this very article, says that it’s a violation of the Creative Commons license to train an LLM on their answers. So what he’s actually proposing is very unclear.

> When AI companies sell their models to customers, they “are unable to attribute each and every one of the community members whose questions and answers were used to train the model, thereby breaching the Creative Commons license,” Chandrasekar says.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#9

Post by noobermin »

This is how it should be. You should not get to train on other people's data for free. It sucks it has to be SO who puts the foot down but at least this is in the right direction. This way, the balance of power is more in content creators' hands, and this avoids the "death of original content creation" people keep complaining about. If you a) have to pay for your training data or b) have to generate your own data, then that incentivizes people to not charge cheapely, and good data from intellectuals, artists, writers, etc, becomes valuable and not something that can just be taken for free.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#10

Post by anant23 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #8

I understand the business motivation, especially because this is likely existential for SO, but it feels perverse to take information that people gave to help others and try to paywall it.

Agreed. But that’s the same mantra of any big co like Twitter, Facebook etc. they all monetize UGC in some form or the other.
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