Edit (May 9) after the months that have passed, and in light of the announcement that SO has now also partnered with OpenAI, I don't fully stand behind this answer anymore. Scroll down for more.
Original post
I'm not happy about this announcement, particularly the fluffy buzzy optimism.
Yet I won't join the general criticism, and indeed say that the actual strategic decision Stack Overflow made here is sensible. Perhaps it is in fact the best decision available (albeit rather in a least-bad-option sense).
Why? Well, let's go through the alternatives. In hypothetical other universes:
- SO takes a stance to keep the platform itself AI-free but the data fully available for anybody.
This is what I would personally find the most amiable option, but a sober look on the actual ramifications makes it not so great. Namely, it would mean that every AI company would just feast on the data without any consideration for things like attribution for post authors at all. Users looking for help wouldn't care about that and for them just using a 3rd-party AI would be the increasingly more convenient option. As a result, SO would end up being more or less a ghost town plundered for its past wealth but with little relevant new activity.
- SO stays out of AI and locks down access strictly to ensure the data stays in human-only hands.
This is undesirable in many ways, both in principle due to things like privacy but also practically because this sort of gatekeeping would make it very unattractive for new users. It might in the short term succeed in making the platform more of a "clean, high-quality human content" place, but over time it would again just make it less and less relevant. Simultaneously it would make AIs worse for programming purposes (assuming the access-control mechanisms actually work in that way), because they couldn't access the SO data; opinions may vary on how good or bad that is, but it would stop mattering when an alternative platform pulls ahead of SO in terms of user- and post count and eventually also catches up on quality (perhaps not quality of the average post, but in the sense that far too many questions simply don't get asked on Stack Overflow anymore).
- SO opens the gates, encourages companies to train their AIs on the posts by SO users without consideration for original author attribution, and then attempts to get back the wins by integrating some of these AIs back into the platform.
I suppose this might briefly make it more popular with newbies, but it would alienate experienced users who are nothing, but cows being milked for content in such a system and increasingly don't get to interact with other users at all, but everybody just with AI.
In the light of all that, revisit the actual decision in a (perhaps naïvely) amenable reading:
- SO stays mostly how it currently is in terms of user interactions, but makes it more cumbersome to mine data in real time. Looking forward, it cooperates with companies who will develop "socially responsible" AI that helps keeping the platform attractive to new users (some of whom will hopefully eventually become experienced and valuable members of the community), whilst also respecting the users who answer questions both by making AI-generated help give attribution to the authors whose work was crucial there, and by keeping them in the loop with votes, future questions, etc.
Again: I'm not very optimistic that this will work out. Will the "responsible" AI be attractive enough to help-seekers (compared to independently trained ones)? Will it actually respect answer authors? Will the quality of information circulated on the site be, if not improved, then at least kept at current levels? - who knows. But it is better to try than not to, and of all the possible strategies, I would indeed assess 4. as the most promising.
Of course, one thing that really would be desirable is that SO discloses the economic side: how much does Google pay for being the "responsible partner"? Are there other contestants, and how do they compare in terms of both money and prospective social responsibility?
May 9 edit
By this point, a status update on what concretely SO is doing to ensure the supposedly non-negotiable "socially responsible" is overdue. Instead, what they have done is another corporate-speech oh we are so good press announcement, and with OpenAI, of all companies. The same OpenAI that started the whole debacle by unleashing ChatGPT in a state that absolutely does not honour the relevant issues like attribution.
It does now look an awful lot like all this "responsible" stuff is just empty talking, written to distract from the cashing-in. I still have hope that SO will prove the critics wrong, but I'm no longer willing to place any trust in it.
I will not contribute to the platform until more concrete information is available. I see several users are self-vandalising their contributions now. This is perhaps a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, but by as it stands now I consider joining in. Too much is at stake to just let these companies get away with pretty words but no evident actions in the right direction.
