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.

This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:

My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

This strikes me as illustrating the digital labor issues associated with generative AI. It’s someone else profiting off of one’s work.

Aw, geez, and I liked Automattic, too. I get that financing Tumblr is hard, but why this?

There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.”

Look, I’ve never been really into Reddit, but I’m still really disappointed in the company. This sucks.

C’mon, Reddit.

This is straight-up awful. Shame on the university for doing this.

Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it.

I have lots of concerns about LLM training, but I think it’s better to think of the issue in terms of digital labor, not copyright. My blog is licensed for reuse, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less exploitative for someone to scrape it all to develop software that will make them rich off my work.

Even more than AI’s potential to replace humans in the name of saving money, I think we need to talk about the way companies are exploiting humans to save money—so that it can train AI.

This is not a future I look forward to (or a present I want to live in).

Lots of good stuff in here.

This is a welcome step, but I’m concerned it’s an empty, distracting gesture—it certainly doesn’t solve the deeper issue.

Zoom’s responses to this are meaningless, empty corporate speak. I’m not concerned about owning my content, I’m concerned about others using it while affirming my ownership. And yes, I “consent” to it in the sense that I use Zoom, but that is meaningless consent and Zoom knows it. What a garbage response.

Everyone excited about generative AI needs to account for this kind of thing. We don’t pay enough attention to digital labor and the dehumanizing aspects of content moderation.

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.

This is a wild, compelling story that I missed when it first came out. Glad to be reading it now.

Good focus on the digital labor aspects of this whole thing. I sympathize with Reddit for not wanting to provide free value for generative AI (this is one of the trickiest parts of that conversation), but Reddit’s users are right to balk at providing free value for the platform.

I’m glad this article points out how much unpaid work mods do to make Reddit a place people want to go. They arguably add more value to the platform than employees do, and this strikes me as a bad move.

What I appreciate about coverage of this from The Verge and Techdirt is the way that it draws attention to questions of digital labor.

Interesting and important read.

Important points in here.

Is there any way to complete a CAPTCHA without providing free labor for ML/AI developers? Makes me angrier every time I have to do it.