"The programmer Q&A site joins Reddit in demanding compensation when its data is used to train algorithms and ChatGPT-style bots"

"DEVELOPING THE AI systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E costs hundreds of millions of dollars—and it’s about to get more expensive."

"But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says."

"It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June."

"The News/Media Alliance, a US trade group of publishers, including Condé Nast, which owns WIRED, today unveiled principles calling on generative AI developers to negotiate any use of their data for training and other purposes and respect their right to fair compensation."

"He argues that will also help future chatbots, which need “to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created.”"

"Having to pay for data they once grabbed for free could extend the already unclear timelines to turning a profit on their emerging technologies."

"Often, data sets used in AI development are built through unofficial means such as dispatching software that scrapes content from websites. In the US that is typically considered legal, though copyright issues and websites’ terms of use against the practice have left it in dispute."

"In Stack Overflow’s case, LLM developers are getting their hands on data through a mix of dumps, APIs, and scraping, Chandrasekar says, all of which today can be done for free."

"Users own the content they post on Stack Overflow, as outlined in its TOS, but it all falls under a Creative Commons license that requires anyone later using the data to mention where it came from."

"When AI companies sell their models to customers, they “are unable to attribute each and every one of the community members whose questions and answers were used to train the model, thereby breaching the Creative Commons license,” Chandrasekar says."

"A potential roadmap to pricing could come from Elon Musk, who this month hiked prices for access to Twitter data. They start at $42,000 per month for access to 50 million tweets. About three times the volume of tweets had been previously available for free."

"In a tweet this week, Musk accused Microsoft, a major AI developer and close partner of OpenAI, of training algorithms “illegally using Twitter data.” Without elaboration, he added, “Lawsuit time.”"

"“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” he said."

"Chandrasekar says a spike in inaccurate answers following the release of ChatGPT had created a challenge for the company’s several hundred or so moderators."