CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Post a comment on Reddit, answer a coding question on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you’re also helping to train the next generation of artificial intelligence.
Not everyone agrees with this, especially as the same online forums they’ve been contributing to for years are increasingly flooded with AI-generated comments mimicking what real humans might say.
Some longtime users have tried to delete their past posts or rewrite them in gibberish, but the protests have had little effect. A handful of governments, including Brazil’s privacy regulator on Tuesday, have also tried to intervene.
“A larger portion of the population feels powerless,” said Sarah Gilbert, a volunteer Reddit moderator who also studies online communities at Cornell University. “They have no choice but to disconnect completely or not contribute in a way that provides value to them and others.”
Platforms are responding, with mixed results. Take Stack Overflow, the popular computer programming advice hub. It initially banned answers written by ChatGPT because of frequent errors, but it’s now partnering with AI chatbot developers and punishing some of its own users who tried to delete their past contributions in protest.
It’s one of many social media platforms grappling with user distrust — and occasional revolts — as they try to adapt to the changes brought by generative AI.
Software developer Andy Rotering of Bloomington, Minnesota, has used Stack Overflow daily for 15 years and said he worries the company “may inadvertently harm its greatest resource”: the community of contributors who volunteer their time to help other programmers.
“It should be paramount to motivate contributors to provide feedback,” he said.
Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said the company is trying to balance the growing demand for instant coding assistance generated by a chatbot with the desire for a community “knowledge base” where people still want to post and “be recognized” for what they’ve contributed.
“In five years, there will be all kinds of machine-generated content on the Web,” he said in an interview. “There will be very few places where you can find authentic, original human thought. And we’re one of those places.”
Chandrasekar likes to describe Stack Overflow’s challenges as one of the “case studies” he learned at Harvard Business School about how a company survives — or doesn’t — after disruptive technological change.
For more than a decade, users typically landed on Stack Overflow after typing a coding question into Google, then finding the answer, copying it, and pasting it. The answers they were most likely to see came from volunteers who had accumulated points that measured their credibility, which in some cases could help them land a job.
Now, programmers can simply ask an AI chatbot (some of which are already trained on anything posted on Stack Overflow) a question and it can instantly provide an answer.
ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 threatened to bankrupt Stack Overflow, so Chandrasekar built a 40-person team within the company to accelerate the launch of its own AI chatbot, called Overflow AI. Then, the company struck deals with Google and ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, allowing AI developers to tap into Stack Overflow’s Q&A archive to further improve their large AI language models.
This kind of strategy makes sense, but it may have come too late, said Maria Roche, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. “I’m surprised Stack Overflow didn’t work on this sooner,” she said.
When some Stack Overflow users attempted to delete their old comments after the Open AI partnership was announced, the company responded by suspending their accounts due to terms that make all contributions “perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow.”
“We quickly responded and said, ‘Look, this is not acceptable behavior,’” Chandrasekar said, describing the protesters as a small minority among the “few hundred” of the platform’s 100 million users.
Brazil’s national data protection authority moved Tuesday to ban social media giant Meta Platforms from using Brazilians’ Facebook and Instagram posts to train its artificial intelligence models, imposing a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,820) for violating the ban.
Meta called the initiative “a step backward in innovation” and said it had been more transparent than many industry peers offering similar AI training on public content, and that its practices were in line with Brazilian laws.
Meta has also encountered resistance in Europe, where it recently suspended plans to begin feeding people’s public posts into training AI systems, which were set to begin last week. In the United States, where there is no national law protecting online privacy, such training is likely already underway.
“The vast majority of people have no idea their data is being used,” Gilbert said.
Reddit took a different approach, partnering with AI developers like OpenAI and Google, while making it clear that content cannot be scraped en masse without the platform’s approval by commercial entities “without regard to user rights or privacy.” Those deals helped Reddit earn the money it needed to make its Wall Street debut in March, with investors pushing the company’s valuation to nearly $9 billion within seconds of its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.
Reddit hasn’t tried to punish users who protest, and it wouldn’t be able to do so easily given the influence volunteer moderators have over what happens in their specialized forums, called subreddits. But what worries Gilbert, who helps moderate the AskHistorians subreddit, is the growing stream of AI-generated comments that moderators must decide whether to allow or ban.
“People come to Reddit because they want to talk to people, they don’t want to talk to bots,” Gilbert said. “There are apps that allow them to talk to bots if they want. But historically, Reddit was designed to connect with humans.”
She said it was ironic that the AI-generated content threatening Reddit came from the comments of millions of human Reddit users, and “there’s a real risk that eventually this could end up driving people away.”
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Associated Press writer Eleanor Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access a portion of the AP’s text archive.
