Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts
Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here
@mcc So developers will stop sharing information on #StackOverflow and future #Copilot and friends will be forever stuck in the past, answering questions about historically relevant frameworks and languages.
#LLM #StuckOverflow
@mcc IIRC Mastodon is older than Lemmy and the current move to Mastodon/Fedi happened in multiple waves, so it may be too early for higher expectations.
For stackoverflow I expect some degradation of quality since they accept “AI” generated content. This may additionally frustrate high quality authors and motivate them to leave. We’ll see.
What would a federated stack overflow look like if we were to invent it?
@chris And, of course, there's the weird element that the SO license *already* does not permit AI on a facial reading, and a distributed SO would probably be *easier* to scrape than the centralized one. So you're not actually preventing AI exploitation, you're only punishing one corporation (SO) for the AI bait-and-switch.
@mcc I personally see less problem in scraping a federated pool of knowledge but I absolutely hate that stackoverflow now owns this knowledge and can keep people from using it but sell “AI” as a service to them.
@chris I suppose one thing to consider is if a federated pool of knowledge is CC-BY-SA, then we only need a court ruling that OpenAI violates CC-BY-SA and the federated pool becomes AI-safe. Whereas SO can, (or already has) change the TOS so they own rights to relicense all content.
…but of course, CC-BY-SA is also incredibly inconvenient for a SO clone because everyone will generally want to copypaste sample code!
@mcc So we’d be looking for Schrödingers license, allowing and forbidding closed derivative works at the same time :-)
(I have a feeling that a lot of licenses only work because nobody has a close look at how their objects are used.)
@chris I *am* worried about the effect "AI" scraping is gonna have on copyleft in general, tho. I think people have for many years released copyleft on the rule of "hey, why not" and now the answer is "bc AI". (More thoughts: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112209121196262534 ) Like, my proposed license in the last post would be very AI-friendly.
@mcc That seems like a good and very straight forward approach, it’s would at least meet my expectations exactly.
@mcc I don't think contract law has (yet) gotten to the stage where a site can change a ToS and make it retroactively apply to people who no longer use the site, making their contributions from many years ago retroactively no longer CC-BY-SA.
@mcc @chris practically speaking, duplicating a single CC-BY-SA code snippet is never going to be practically actionable, because the damages payable would be miniscule. There's also a strong argument to be made that a whole software package is not a derivative work of a small snippet, although I wouldn't want to be the one paying for that judgement.
@womble @chris As a person putting up sample code, I want that sample code to be useful to other people. I think the license should be picked to maximize that utility. The way I see it, one of the ways to maximize the utility is to make the license *unambiguous*. If the recipient has to *wonder* whether they can use the code, I am causing them unnecessary problems even if they eventually do use the code.
@mcc there is that. Finding a licence wording that explicitly allows the "good" uses, without allowing the "bad" uses, that doesn't have a billion unintended consequences, is probably something beyond human capacity. Quick, get an AI to write it!
@chris @mcc SO publishes database dumps so we could all make a fork and start from there with something more libre
@hey Good idea!
I was wondering if they still did and I expected, that they already stopped doing this.
I had this tool that indexed local copies of SO for referencing but I keep forgetting to reinstall it and update the database.
Thanks for reminding me!
@chris they still do (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange) and still out of their own infrastructure.
IIRC they made Stack Exchange as a response of entshittication of another Q&A service and when they designed it they made a promise to make the content on open license and publicly available so once they go evil people can move on somewhere else taking the content with them.
Which I guess might be heading into this direction.