Obviously, given the subject matter, I had to let ChatGPT generate a summary for this:
The Meta Stack Overflow post discusses a policy decision regarding the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, on the platform. The key points include:
- Ban on Generative AI: The community has decided to prohibit the use of generative AI for answering questions on Stack Overflow. This is due to concerns about the quality and reliability of AI-generated content.
- Quality Control: The decision aims to maintain high standards for answers, as AI-generated responses may lack accuracy and context, potentially leading to misinformation.
- Community Feedback: The policy was influenced by feedback from the community, emphasizing the importance of human expertise in providing reliable answers.
- Future Considerations: The post suggests that while the current stance is a ban, the situation may be revisited in the future as the technology evolves.
Overall, the policy reflects a commitment to ensuring that the content on Stack Overflow remains trustworthy and valuable to its users.
It has now been finalized as of yesterday, from what I understand. Previously it was a work-in-progress policy change they were still unsure about, and now it’s decided that this is the way going forward.
I reckon sadly at least part of the reason will be that they are in a partnership with OpenAI, and feeding generated stuff into a GenAI breaks the model, so they need to keep SO as non-AI as possible.
Yeah this is just them trying to prevent model collapse (stemming from pollution of training data by ai garbage). The moral thing to do here is to not give a fuck and upload as much AI garbage as possible to poison their dataset. Fucking assholes.
“Avoid model collapse” aka “avoid giving garbage answers”. If they’re gonna use a lot of energy to train an AI, why not at least make the product good-ish?
If you allow them to make money with their garbage, they will be incentivized to keep going. I want them to go bankrupt.
Does the harm that does to the community not factor into your moral calculus?
Stack Overflow only pretends to care about their community and I’m tired of contributing the greater good of the technical community at large (edit: by contributing to Stack Overflow). Stack Overflow has a track record of ignoring Meta. Why even have it if you’re not going to listen?
I does factor that in and my answer is to abandon ship or mutiny. By contributing to their ecosystem you validate their sense of not having done anything wrong.
As we have seen with reddit, the next step here is closing off API access and banning searchengines and crawlers from using the sites resources. At that point there is little value left in the platform just like with reddit.
