Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar poses on May 21, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. Chandrasekar said the company is trying to balance rising demand for instant chatbot-generated coding assistance with the desire for a community “knowledge base” where people still want to post and “get recognized” for what they’ve contributed. CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
“A more significant portion of the population just kind of feels helpless,” said Reddit volunteer moderator Sarah Gilbert, who also studies online communities at Cornell University. “There’s nowhere to go except just completely going offline or not contributing in ways that bring value to them and value to others.”
“Fast forward five years — there’s going to be all sorts of machine-generated content on the web,” he said in an interview. “There’s going to be very few places where there’s truly authentic, original human thought. And we’re one of those places.” Now programmers can simply ask an AI chatbot — some of which are already trained on everything ever posted to Stack Overflow — and it can instantly spit out an answer.
When some Stack Overflow users tried to delete their past 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.” Meta in a statement called it a “step backwards for innovation” and said it has been more transparent than many industry counterparts doing similar AI training on public content, and that its practices comply with Brazilian laws.