Stack Overflow signs deal with OpenAI, bans users trying to alter answers

We’re all aware of Stack Overflow – it’s a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of “I just copied the code off Stack Overflow” has become a consistent meme to indicate you don’t fully grasp how something works, but at least it works.

If you’ve ever contributed answers to Stack Overflow, you might want to consider deleting them, altering them, or perhaps even go as far as request a GDPR removal if you’re in the European Union, because Stack Overflow has just announced a close partnership with “AI” company OpenAI (or, more accurately, “Open” “AI”). Stripped of marketing speak, the gist is exactly as you’d expect: OpenAI will absorb the questions and answers on Stack Overflow into its models, whether their respective authors like it or not.

As much as you may want to try and delete your answers if you’re not interesting in having your work generate profit for OpenAI, deleting popular questions and answers is not possible on Stack Overflow. The other option is altering your answers to render them useless, but it seems Stack Overflow is not going to allow you to do this, either. Ben Humphreys tried to alter his highest-rated answers, and Stack Overflow just reverted them back, and proceeded to ban him from the platform.

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.
↫ Ben Humphreys

Now that they’ve made what is most likely an incredibly lucrative deal with OpenAI that’s going to net Stack Overflow’s owners boatloads of money, they obviously can’t let users delete or alter their answers to lower the monetary value of Stack Overflow’s content. Measures to prevent deletion or alteration are probably one of the clauses in the agreement between Stack Overflow and OpenAI. So there’s likely not much you can do to not have your answers sucked into OpenAI, but you should at least be aware it’s happening in case of future answers you might want to contribute.