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@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

@chris Yeah. But for this to be true, we need a Stack Overflow replacement. And when Reddit went evil, the move to Lemmy doesn't seem to have succeeded as well as the move from Twitter to Mastodon.

@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 I don't know. It's an interesting question because Stack Overflow is inherently more search-focused than Lemmy or Mastodon.

A good model for a distributed/ownerless SO might wind up looking more like bluesky than mastodon.

@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.)

mcc

@chris If I were actually trying to create a stackoverflow clone, I'd have the default license be something like "all code blocks are CC0 but all human text outside the code blocks is CC-BY-SA". That would I think match the unspoken expectations both contributors and readers have.

@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: mastodon.social/@mcc/112209121 ) Like, my proposed license in the last post would be very AI-friendly.

@mcc @chris this would be a situation in which the FSF could have a beneficial effect. Bring a test case against OpenAI for infringement against the codebases FSF fully owns. It'd answer the question one way or the other.

@mcc That seems like a good and very straight forward approach, it’s would at least meet my expectations exactly.