Stack Exchange and digital labor

Today, Stack Overflow announced that it was entering into a partnership with OpenAI to provide data from the former to the latter for the purposes of training ChatGPT, etc. I’ve used Stack Overflow a fair amount over the years, and there have also been times where I tried to get into some of the other Stack Exchange sites, contributing both questions and answers. I haven’t really been active on any of these sites in recent times, but I still decided to take a couple of minutes this afternoon and follow the advice of one outraged Mastodon post: delete my contributions and shut down my accounts.

Shutting down my SE accounts has been pretty straightforward, but when I took the time to try to delete the questions and answers that I’d posted, I was surprised at… not always being able to do so. I don’t know if this is a policy that predates the intent to partner with OpenAI, but I found that I wasn’t able to delete any answered questions or any accepted answers. I haven’t contributed a ton to Stack Exchange, but most of what I have contributed is now an answered question or an accepted answer, so even though my accounts are disappearing from the network of sites, my contributions will not be.

Digital labor—the idea that some individual or corporation is financially profiting off of individuals’ unrewarded contributions to a social media platform—is one of the main lenses that I’ve been bringing to my consideration of generative AI, and it certainly seems relevant here. The idea of Stack Exchange is a great one—why not provide a platform where people can answer each other’s questions? I’ve gotten stats advice, provided R advice, shared a Squirrel Girl screencap to a discussion about Galactus, gotten into the weeds about the term “CV,” and talked about tenses in French. The idea, though, that I can’t delete my own contributions to the platform raises serious questions about who stands to benefit from these contributions.

The language that the SE sites uses about other people. I’ve been told that I “cannot delete this question as others have invested time and effort into answering it,” and I’ve been warned against “deleting questions with answers because doing so deprives future readers of this knowledge.” Yet, especially in the context of partnership with OpenAI, the unacknowledged elephant in the room is the money that Stack Exchange stands to make off of selling access to my answers for the purposes of training generative AI. If I delete my “useful” data from the site, SE stands to profit less off of it.

As I acknowledged earlier, I’ve never been terribly active on Stack Exchange, and with one exception, I’ve never tried deleting my contributions to the site before. This policy could have been in place for quite some time—before SE was earning money from OpenAI via my data, it was earning money from other sources via my data. Whatever the details, though, this sucks. Digital labor is an exploitative relationship between platforms and their users, and generative AI is making all of this worse. It sucks, and I hate it.

• Stack Exchange
• digital labor
• OpenAI
• generative AI
• ChatGPT
• Stack Overflow
• Squirrel Girl
• R
• French