In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by the community. There are reports today that several users have attempted to delete their content (questions and answers) from Stack Overflow with some difficulty, as the website doesn’t allow all things to be easily deleted. So, these users have decided to edit their questions and/or answers in an effort to “deface” them in protest of the cooperation between Stack Overflow and OpenAI.

About the Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partnership

Stack Overflow and OpenAI have joined forces through a new API partnership. This collaboration aims to provide developers with a powerful combination of Stack Overflow’s vast knowledge platform and OpenAI’s advanced AI models. Through the OverflowAPI access, OpenAI users will benefit from accurate and verified data from Stack Overflow, facilitating quicker problem-solving and enabling technologists to focus on priority tasks. Additionally, OpenAI will integrate validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow into ChatGPT, enhancing users’ access to reliable information and code.

Key aspects of the collaboration include:

• OpenAI will utilize Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI to enhance its AI models and provide attribution to the Stack Overflow community within ChatGPT.
• Stack Overflow will incorporate OpenAI models into their development of OverflowAI and collaborate with OpenAI to optimize model performance.
• Both parties aim to improve the developer experience and foster efficiency and collaboration through community-driven features and socially responsible AI practices.

The initial integrations and capabilities resulting from this partnership will be rolled out in the first half of 2024, with a focus on enhancing user and developer experiences across both platforms.

The AI Backlash

While Stack Overflow, and other Stack Exchange websites, are amazingly useful tools for the communities they serve, there are users who are not too excited about their content being used to train AI that will then offer their answers without attribution. This is actually a common reaction today by many of the authors of content across the Internet, not just content posted to Stack Overflow.

The Internet is in a current state of flux with blogs getting decreased traffic and page views, AI being used to find answers more, some people not using search engines as much, and other changes. It’s definitely a time of tension as people are both adjusting to the new abilities of AI’s like ChatGPT and other LLMs (large language models), as well as the uncertainty of what this all means for the Internet as we know it.

This recent backlash over the Stack Overflow and OpenAI partnership is only one example of the negative ways some people are reacting to the massive adoption of AI and the drastic changes that’s bringing us.

Is Stack Overflow Banning Accounts for Removing Content?

There have been multiple users posting to Twitter and Hacker News reporting that they have been receiving an email from Stack Overflow moderators stating their accounts have been placed on a 7 day hold, or temporary ban. This is after these users started attempting to delete multiple posts, both questions and answers, they had previously posted to the Stack Overflow website.

Here’s a Twitter posts from one of these users:

LOL. @StackOverflow mods are experiencing some frustration as several users have been deleting their answers since the announcement with @OpenAI partnership. As a result, they have started suspending accounts that engage in this behavior. It's important to note that the "right to… pic.twitter.com/M2YbKGXpzC

— nixCraft 🐧 (@nixcraft) May 8, 2024

As per the email from the Stack Overflow Moderation Team, it can be disruptive to the entire community to delete or remove content that might be useful to someone else. Even if this content is no longer useful to you as the author. Since Stack Overflow’s business, and the entire Stack Exchange network, depends on the user generated content for the websites to remain useful, the business reasons they don’t want massive amounts of users removing content is obvious.

To be fair to Stack Overflow, the warning email and suspending of accounts is likely not a new thing. They’ve probably had this policy in place for a long time in an effort to protect the platform. It actually would be quite disruptive to the platform for users to easily deface and/or delete massive amounts of content, so it’s in their best interest, and that of the community, to protect the content. Also, this is likely an automated email triggered by the users actions, and contacting Stack Overflow directly about your content would be a good course of action.

So far, I haven’t seen any replies from Stack Overflow about these accounts being suspended. It’s also unclear how many users are actually attempting to do this, so there may not be a huge amount of backlash against the Stack Overflow and OpenAI partnership. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out going forward, as the forward momentum of AI adoption is not slowing down any time soon.

As for the rest of us Stack Overflow users, I would not recommend jumping to delete your own content in protest too.

Stack Overflow Warning Email to Users

The contents of the email that Stack Overflow is reportedly sending to users when they are suspending / banning their accounts, is as follows:

Hello,

We’re writing in reference to your Stack Overflow account:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/<userid>/<username>

You have recently removed or defaced content from your posts. Please note that once you post a question or answer to this site, those posts become part of the collective efforts of others who have also contributed to that content. Posts that are potentially useful to others should not be removed except under extraordinary circumstances. Event if the post is no longer useful to the original author, that information is still beneficial to others who may run into similar problems in the future – this is the underlying philosophy of Stack Exchange.

Extensive deletions take a lot of effort to repair, please read “I’ve thought better of my question; can I delete it?” for possible alternatives. Because of the amount of disruption these incidents can cause, we have placed your account on hold for 7 days while we reach out to you to avoid any further misunderstandings. Once this matter has been resolved, your reputation score will be restored and your account will resume as normal.

We sincerely hope this is just a misunderstanding, but we understand that you may have an exceptional reason to remove this content. If so, let us know by replying to this message.

Regards,
Stack Overflow Moderation Team