On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow’s technical content with OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant. However, the deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow’s user community, with many expressing anger and protest over the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models.
“I hate this. I’m just going to delete/deface my answers one by one,” wrote one user on sister site Stack Exchange. “I don’t care if this is against your silly policies, because as this announcement shows, your policies can change at a whim without prior consultation of your stakeholders. You don’t care about your users, I don’t care about you.”
Stack Overflow is a popular question-and-answer site for software developers that allows users to ask and answer technical questions related to coding. The site has a large community of developers who contribute knowledge and expertise to help others solve programming problems. Over the past decade, Stack Overflow has become a heavily utilized resource for many developers seeking solutions to common coding challenges.