AI Versus The Internet

On May 6, 2024 OpenAI and StackOverflow issued statements announcing that they would be collaborating jointly on their respective AI missions. OverflowAI, StackOverflow’s LLM project, would depend on OpenAI, and presumably OpenAI would get access to StackOverflow’s 59 million questions and answers.

On the surface level, this makes a ton of sense. StackOverflow has a massive repository of natural language articles in several different languages and multiple subject matters. These questions even have labeled answers, meaning that OpenAI would get access to a data repository with questions and labeled, correct answers. You don’t need to know too much about AI to know how valuable that would be.

OpenAI is the leading LLM developer, and the application of LLM’s to StackOverflow makes sense. It can help cut down on duplicate questions, answer questions faster and, possibly, create answers with rich and hopefully correct context versus some of the… toxic or incomplete StackOverflow answers you see fairly frequently.

You might be surprised, then, to find that there was significant controversy following this announcement. This Wired article sums it up fairly well. StackOverflow users are furious because they feel as though the platform is selling off their contributions for cash to a company that is doing a lot of ill on platforms like StackOverflow. They feel…