Stack Overflow users who deleted answers in protest of OpenAI's partnership with the platform were banned



Stack Overflow, a knowledge community for computers and programming, has partnered with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to make ChatGPT available to answer questions with verified technical knowledge posted on Stack Overflow. In response to this decision, some users have reportedly been banned from Stack Overflow after deleting their answers to prevent them from being scraped.

Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner to Strengthen the World's Most Popular Large Language Models - Press release - Stack Overflow

https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnership



Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt



Stack Overflow announced on May 6, 2024 that it will work with OpenAI to make verified technical knowledge easily accessible to OpenAI through Stack Overflow's API. Through this partnership, when users enter technical questions into ChatGPT, ChatGPT will be able to access Stack Overflow's archive of technical information and refer to relevant answers and information. At the same time, Stack Overflow will use OpenAI's AI models for its in-house generative AI, OverflowAI, to maximize performance.

'Through our industry-leading partnership with OpenAI, we are committed to redefining the developer experience by driving efficiency and collaboration through the power of community, best-in-class data, and AI experiences,' said Prashanth Chandraskar, CEO of Stack Overflow.

However, some Stack Overflow users are not happy about their answers being used by ChatGPT, reports IT news site Tom's Hardware.

Following Stack Overflow's decision, Stack Overflow user Ben tried to delete his previous answers. However, Ben's answer was one that had received many positive reviews and could not be deleted. So Ben rewrote his answer as a criticism of OpenAI, asking, 'Why would OpenAI try to profit from my work?' and deleted the answer, but it was quickly rewritten as the original post.



In addition, Stack Overflow said, 'Your account has been suspended for 7 days because deleting posts is causing significant confusion.'



' In accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I am requesting that my questions and answers be permanently deleted, ' Ben wrote on Mastodon . 'I want you to know that any content you post on any platform can potentially be used for profit. It's only a matter of time before all your messages on Discord, Twitter, etc. are collected, fed into a model, and sold .'

in Web Service, Posted by log1i_yk