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Update May 14, 2024

I know there have been a lot of questions and comments around attribution. I recently answered a question related to both and am linking to it here for visibility.

Today, we announced an exciting new partnership with OpenAI. We’re pleased that OpenAI shares our commitment to socially responsible AI.

You can find more details about this in the press release.

We share updates on partnerships here on Meta because we believe in providing a space for you to ask questions about them. Partnerships are another revenue stream for us, similar to Stack Overflow for Teams or Advertising, which allows us to fund initiatives to benefit the community.

As work begins in the future, we will have more to share about how integrations with our partners will work.

In terms of project phases, we’re at the very beginning - there’s a great deal of discovery work and actual coding to do, and during that time, anything specific promised about how this will work here could change, so we want to be sure that we aren’t inadvertently misleading folks in these early announcements.

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    Please consider including more information directly in this post instead of just linking to the blog post. It would also be worth including here preemptive responses to the most obvious concerns that users are going to have in response to this announcement.
    – Mithical
    Commented May 6 at 13:05
  • 117
    This post is on Stack Exchange Meta, but it sounds like the partnership is only for Stack Overflow and not the rest of the network. Can you clarify?
    – Adám
    Commented May 6 at 13:07
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    I second @Mithical. I'd also recommend keeping in mind that the audience of the blog and the audience of Meta SE are very different. The blog, based on the past posts, tends to be the general public, including various stakeholders. It's a marketing tool. Meta SE should be focused on the community. It may take some more work, but I'd strongly recommend drafting two versions of these announcements and making sure the Meta SE version doesn't have business/marketing speak, but targets our concerns as active participants in the communities.
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented May 6 at 13:08
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    @Cerbrus - no, not at all. The two are unrelated, and the situation on SO was never a factor in the timing of this release.
    – Philippe StaffMod
    Commented May 6 at 13:11
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    Do the people who actually contributed the answers get anything out of this deal (attribution? access to the trained model? part of the profit?)
    – Aykhan Hagverdili
    Commented May 6 at 14:02
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    Related: Our partnership with Google and commitment to socially responsible AI
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented May 6 at 14:43
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    @Rosie That's the kind of content that should be in the body of the post on Meta SE. Information about what phase the work is in, when we should expect more information (days, weeks, months), what the next things that the community will see are. This is the important stuff. Also an explicit statement that someone or some people are watching and will be addressing questions (and then, of course, following through by updating the post with answers to questions). I think if you do these things, you may alleviate some down votes that result in these posts being hidden from the front page.
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented May 6 at 15:05
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    Trusting OpenAI to be socially responsible, is like trusting Facebook to respect your privacy.
    – S.L. Barth is on codidact.com
    Commented May 6 at 18:23
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    Folks, let's not close this. While more details in the post would have been nice, it's not productive to close staff announcements, especially featured ones.
    – cocomac
    Commented May 6 at 20:24
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    Guess my contributions to the community have reached an end. Godspeed, stack overflow.
    – stateMachine
    Commented May 6 at 21:31
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    I mean... I knew all my answers were being stolen before, but having it cemented like this is repugnant. My contributions will be made elsewhere from now on.
    – Caspar Harmer
    Commented May 6 at 22:04
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    why did you not partner with open source foundations instead instead of closedai
    – Rainb
    Commented May 7 at 7:53
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    @Rainb Because money. "Partnerships are another revenue stream for us," Which is understandable, but unfortunately they partner with companies whose goals are not in line with the needs and desires of the community.
    – S.L. Barth is on codidact.com
    Commented May 7 at 7:59
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    I hate this. I'm just going to delete/deface my answers one by one. 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.
    – henning no longer feeds AI
    Commented May 7 at 14:11
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    @henning Please don't do that; you'd only be making more work for the folks around you that also care about the site(s) you contribute to. The company did a spectacularly horrendous job of announcing this, whatever it's supposed to be, but we truly have zero information at all about what this will practically mean. I think we should get a little bit more of an idea of concrete impact before anyone considers nuclear options.
    – zcoop98
    Commented May 7 at 15:42

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There are a lot of questions and comments that have come up around attribution. Attribution is something that we believe strongly in. Having credit attributed is a non-negotiable for us, and is a critical part of any and all partnerships of this type. There aren’t specific details yet because the work is just starting, but making sure attribution is happening (in a license-compliant way) is a commitment we require and have received from our partners. This is the very heart of socially responsible AI.

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    This makes me more comfortable about the liability accrued by OpenAI's actions (which, unless copyright law is changed, Stack Exchange can not afford to take on). Unless they have secret technology they haven't released (not unlikely), OpenAI does not have the capacity to provide attribution in their AI systems. Are all parties comfortable with a partnership where one of the partners isn't allowed to do anything?
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented May 6 at 17:11
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    Why isn't this in the body of the question post?
    – zcoop98
    Commented May 6 at 18:09
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    Will this really be attribution, or will the output of ChatGPT just be used to find random posts that happen to resemble the answer? I suspect the latter.
    – S.L. Barth is on codidact.com
    Commented May 6 at 18:29
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    This statement is very weak, especially the "in a license-compliant way". The attribution clauses in the CC licenses have a lot of ambiguity and the "reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context" leaves outs for the person receiving the content. It's very possible to be fully compliant with the license with respect to attribution and have a very weak form of it.
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented May 6 at 21:30
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    I will be expecting my username to be attributed to every output made by this AI model (which itself will be licensed CC-BY-SA) assuming any content I have contributed is used to train it, as dictated by CC-BY-SA. A note giving attribution to SO/SE as a whole is not enough, it has to be my username, otherwise it is a breach of license and I will take appropriate action and issue takedown notices to stop any parties violating my copyright. CC-BY-SA is very explicit about this. I doubt I'm the only one going to do this. Are you going to comply with this?
    – Kryomaani
    Commented May 6 at 22:22
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    Please also remember that according to section 6 of the CC-BY-SA license, any breach of the license not cured within 30 days of you being informed of it will terminate the license. This would render displaying affected contributions on any of your sites and using your AI illegal, with or without attribution. I promise to that I will do everything in my power to see my copyright upheld and I urge all users to do the same. This kind of willful ignorance of copyright on part of SE should not be tolerated.
    – Kryomaani
    Commented May 7 at 1:30
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    "There aren’t specific details yet because the work is just starting..." It would be very nice if more specific details could be shared when the work has progressed more, just to be more assured.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Commented May 7 at 6:39
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    "There aren’t specific details yet because the work is just starting...". It is pretty scary (to say the least) that this kind of core questions were not answered prior to any agreements and any announcements. When such a dividing topic is announced, I think we could expect to have some FAQ with explicit answers about such obvious issues for SO/SE users
    – Double Sept
    Commented May 7 at 8:47
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    Problem is we heard the same assurances lots of times already for many of the past projects that crashed and burned. Another "we don't have anything to share and work is just starting but don't worry, it will be totally fine when the feature is rolled out" doesn't cut it at this point. I'd bet a full years' salary that this will not be delivered in a way that satisfies the community, and probably not even in a way that satisfies the letter of the license.
    – l4mpi
    Commented May 7 at 10:45
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    And also, the "socially responsible AI" thing is a bad joke. What's supposed to be responsible about wasting tons of energy and resources on an inaccurate text generator that (assuming this will be based on GPT-4 or later) has a foundation stemming from egregious data slurping and copyright abuse, and includes all manner of problematic content in its training data (racism, conspiracies, etc).
    – l4mpi
    Commented May 7 at 10:51
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    So attribution for the training data should be given to the person who posted an AI-generated answer, which was obtained from training the AI on data for which attribution should be given-... Why doesn't OpenAI see that this is a loop that only serves to make their AI increasingly dumber with every iteration? SO the company was first insisting that AI generated posts are good for the site, only stepping back after massive criticism. And now you are trying to sell access to the data which the company itself has actively encouraged to get polluted with AI content. What's the longterm plan here?
    – Lundin
    Commented May 7 at 11:11
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    @Rosie, I find it hard to believe that Stack & OpenAI have gotten as far as announcing the partnership in a joint press release if the terms & conditions of the data licensing were not already sorted out as part of any contractual agreement.
    – AMtwo
    Commented May 7 at 19:43
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    As an additional point, AI uses vast amount of energy. I'd like to see a commitment that OpenAI can't use SO training data on servers not powered by renewable energy under any circumstances.
    – Copilot
    Commented May 10 at 13:01
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    When I use Windows Copilot or Bing Chat, all of the codes coming from StackOverflow are clearly linked there, that's exactly how I've found many answers. So I don't know why some people are worried about attributions. One of the Windows Copilot's main feature is showing the source of the information so we can verify it and not blindly trust whatever it tells us.
    – SpyNet
    Commented May 14 at 17:41
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    @Kryomaani "Please also remember that according to section 6 of the CC-BY-SA license, any breach of the license not cured within 30 days of you being informed of it will terminate the license." did you post that as an answer? I think more people need to know about all this.
    – stopkillinggames.com
    Commented May 14 at 18:20
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