Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#21

Post by Paul-Craft »

disntthinkthis wrote: post #14
CharlesW wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, because it's a license violation — "If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original". That includes derived data products, like AI models, built using the content.

…yet in the same article he’s talking about selling the data to LLM developers. It’s hard to make sense of.

SO content is dual licensed to SO, giving them the right to "commercially exploit" it. That means they can relicense under terms that also allow commercial exploitation.

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

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#22

Post by Paul-Craft »

CharlesW wrote: post #11
disntthinkthis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Yes, because it's a license violation — "If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original". That includes derived data products, like AI models, built using the content.

That seems rather debatable. While I don't think the overall use case favors fair use, due to the commercial nature of most of the end products, the fact that such use is clearly transformative is definitely a positive factor on the side of LLM creators:

> A key consideration in later fair use cases is the extent to which the use is transformative. In the 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc,[13] the U.S. Supreme Court held that when the purpose of the use is transformative, this makes the first factor more likely to favor fair use.[14] Before the Campbell decision, federal Judge Pierre Leval argued that transformativeness is central to the fair use analysis in his 1990 article, Toward a Fair Use Standard.[11] Blanch v. Koons is another example of a fair use case that focused on transformativeness. In 2006, Jeff Koons used a photograph taken by commercial photographer Andrea Blanch in a collage painting.[15] Koons appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. Koons prevailed in part because his use was found transformative under the first fair use factor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#23

Post by pharmakom »

mindcrime wrote: post #15

So the "AI Giants" that have already trained models using SO / Reddit data will have a perpetual advantage over any newcomers trying to come up. So yeah, totally not a fan of this position from SO / Reddit. Anybody trying to democratize access to foundation models, who isn't (Google|OpenAI|Meta|Microsoft) is now going to find the on-ramp even steeper than ever. As if it wasn't bad enough just paying for compute time.…

Perhaps but stack overflow answers have a shelf life. Who cares how to fix an obscure React 3.0 issue these days?

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#24

Post by tpoacher »

Meanwhile I was considering an addendum to my GPL licenses to read something like, "use of this code is strictly limited to humans. under no circumstances may an artificial agent use this for training. Any evidence of sufficient similarity in an AI output will be construed as a violation of this license".

Obviously it wont work, but I do wonder if this is a direction GPL4 should be looking into ...

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#26

Post by Naira_Nicol »

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#27

Post by nodemaker »

Naira_Nicol wrote: post #26

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such dec…

“Old man shouting at the clouds”

Its not easy to stop technology with regulation. At this point companies in many countries have started building their LLMs on the whole internet.

Just upgrade yourself)

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#28

Post by Karawebnetwork »

pharmakom wrote: post #23
mindcrime wrote: post #15

So the "AI Giants" that have already trained models using SO / Reddit data will have a perpetual advantage over any newcomers trying to come up. So yeah, totally not a fan of this position from SO / Reddit. Anybody trying to democratize access to foundation models, who isn't (Google|OpenAI|Meta|Microsoft) is now going to find the on-ramp even steeper than ever. As if it wasn't bad enough just paying for compute time.…

Perhaps but stack overflow answers have a shelf life. Who cares how to fix an obscure React 3.0 issue these days?

One of my main use of AI right now is using it to answer legacy questions. Searching for old AngularJS (not Angular) question online is painful, yet ChatGPT is able to come up with explanations, code snippets and even outright provide code based on prompts.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#29

Post by okdood64 »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #16
avmich wrote: post #2

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

right? like, as a top 500 user, do i get a say in this?

Why should you? It's their platform.

EDIT: Someone just posted snippet of their ToS, seems like it's not your data.

Re: Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data

#30

Post by vivegi »

Ironic.

SO content is user generated. It is a bit rich for them to put a wall around it and claim that it is chargeable for use as an AI training set by other companies (unless they also have a plan to share the income with their users).

Especially so given their stance on cash bounties for answers/sponsored questions etc.,

The mods on SO and StackExchange family of sites frown upon cash bounties for answers. But when SO itself wants to erect a paywall around the Question-Answer set for AI training, it is somehow clean and moral.

Smells like BS.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251576/how-open-is-...

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25615/offering-actu...

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/57850/pay-money-to-...

Post reply on HN