[random_cynic]

ChatGPT provides far more value than StackOverflow currently. It's not just trained on SO answers but all of the manuals/help pages, Github issues and forum posts. In addition you can continue a conversation. No rigid format or gatekeeping like stackoverflow. I don't see a real use case for Stackoverflow now. If I want to ask humans, Discord/IRC channels are far better option.

[xpe]

> No rigid format or gatekeeping like stackoverflow.

What bothers about gatekeeping? I could guess, but I'm asking so you say it out loud. Then you can compare it against other problems, such as moats (competitive barriers).

OpenAI spent something like $3M on training GPT-3. This is a pretty big moat. But almost certainly more valuable in dollar terms is the first-mover advantage which provides millions of human eye-hours used for RLHF.

I wouldn't be so eager to trade the gatekeepers you so fear for even an openly available chat service that is happy to automate away as much information work as possible.

The Stack Overflow model is (was) pretty darn good -- people help each other out, the company made money, some people got noticed for their skills, products got build faster and better (on the whole, I hope). Contrast the human-generated content era to what we have now which appears to be the machine-ingesting content era. There are legions of lawsuits against companies scraping data without permission and/or attribution.

[juleiie]

Those companies know it is unethical at best but make quick bucks before the laws and suits follow. It’s the Wild West era and they found the gold.

If it is unregulated then it will be exploited to the maximum profit, consequences be damned.

[random_cynic]

> I wouldn't be so eager to trade the gatekeepers you so fear for even an openly available chat service that is happy to automate away as much information work as possible.

Don't flatter yourself. People want to solve their problems so that they can build what they want to. They don't have time for shenanigans from internet jerks who get their validation from imaginary internet points.

[eVeechu7]

It can't reliably cite its source for an answer.

[random_cynic]

Hardly matters for Stackoverflow like questions if the provided solutions work/solve the problem you're having. Which for me happens majority of the time (with GPT-4 not the free version).

[paulryanrogers]

If you copy-paste solutions from SO then please at least cite your sources and their license (CC-BY-SA).

[lannisterstark]

You might not want to hear this but no one does this. Should they? probably. But most people don't use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V in the first place for SO answers.

[muxator]

Just a single data point, but when I copy & paste a snippet from Stack Overflow, I always add a comment "// source: https://stack overflow.com/questions/xxx#yyy".

I both find it respectful of who wrote the answer in the first place and useful for future users of the code: the Stack Overflow answer often provides context and explanation for what would otherwise be an obscure piece of code.

Pretty darn useful if you ask me: those who want to have more information can follow the link, casual readers can skip it, and the whole process if fair to the author.

[lolc]

I don't think I've ever copied enough from Stackoverflow for copyright to become relevant. Rarely more than one line verbatim.

It embarrasses me to think that somebody should feel obliged to cite me when they use one of my answers. I don't know how to take the partnership with Openai though. They bill me when I use their service, it's not collaborative like Stackoverflow.

[random_cynic]

No one should copy paste any solutions from anywhere. FWIW, 99% of the content in SO is hardly "original", mostly copy-pasted themselves from previous solutions or original user guide/manuals.

[paulryanrogers]

In general I'd agree that it's best to use answers just as a guide. That said, I wasn't trying to pass judgement, just ask attribution which is a best practice and often required by the license itself.

[phatfish]

Id rather not go round in circles while ChatGPT feeds me bullshit information. When this happens i go to Google and read a SO answer with the correct information and also get an informed discussion around the subject.

For the easy answers LLMs are fine, but I usually want an answer to a niche issue or edge case, where LLMs have to be constantly told they are plain wrong, before getting to something resembling an answer.

[servus45678981]

No it doesn‘t. It is overly censored