If you ask most people today what MySpace was, most people probably wouldn't know, but MySpace was the largest social media network on the planet 20 years ago. I suspect if you ask the average junior developer 5 years down the road what StackOverflow was, he or she would have no idea. If you don't believe me, check out the above traffic graph from StackOverflow. Extrapolating these figures implies it'll have zero users 2 years from now.
StackOverflow just laid off 28 percent of its staff because of AI eating its market share. Since its peak of 20 million monthly users, it's now at 9 million. This happened in 1 year!
In 1 year StackOverflow lost 55% of its users!
The reasons are obvious, generative AI such as ChatGPT and CoPilot is simply ripping out the rug beneath SO's feet, and there's no reason to phrase your questions to Google when you can ask CoPilot and ChatGPT to create your code. The effects on StackOverflow is dramatic.
Legal battles
StackOverflow again is threatening to sue OpenAI and others, wanting to charge them for using their material to train their models. There's just one problem, the copyright to the content at SO doesn't belong to SO, it belongs to the users who created it. SO only have a "license to use it for their purposes", similarly to how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have "licensed" our content.
That means that SO can in theory prevent crawlers and such from scraping their site, but they cannot (legally) prevent AI from using their content, simply because it's not their content, it belongs to who ever created it, implying me and you. Let's look at the above chart once more to understand the gravity here ...
Following the above graph to its natural conclusion means SO will no longer exist 12 months from now.
Disrupting disruption
Every single crowd sourced website have the same problem, which is that "their content" isn't actually "their content", but belongs to those who created it. Facebook doesn't own the copyright to its database for instance, that copyright belongs to me, you, and 3 billion additional users, who created our status updates and comments over the years. This implies that if you can legally gain access to Facebook's database somehow, you can copy and paste that content as much as you please, and do whatever you wish with it, without Facebook being able to do anything to legally stop you.
The users who actually created the content might sue you for copyright violations, but Facebook cannot, since the copyright belongs to YOU and not Facebook
In addition AI never creates a copy anymore than the human minds creates a copy when it taught itself things by reading books, for then to apply that knowledge in creating new things. It's like saying that every single artist that painted anything after Picasso, stole Picasso's work as they painted modern art. It simply doesn't work that way.
If you paint a red canvas, I look at it and become "inspired", and I paint a red canvas - Then my red canvas belongs to me, and your red canvas belongs to you
Trying to create laws that prohibits AI from becoming inspired inevitably will result in laws prohibiting human beings from becoming inspired, at which point we could say that everything is the copyright of the human being who invented painting 40,000 years ago, and the human being who invented literacy some 10,000 years ago. The madness of this is self evident.
Sorry StackOverflow, it's not yours to control
Sorry StackOverflow, your precious code and answers aren't yours, they never were, and they never will be. This is exactly how it should be. 20 years ago you were "the shit", and people were happy about your services. At some point you grew fat and lazy, and couldn't keep up anymore, and somebody came and took your cheese.
You built your entire existence upon taking somebody elses cheese, now somebody else are taking your cheese. It's over, go home StackOverflow, you're done for, and that's the way it should be ...
Sound of me scraping StackOverflow for YOUR copyright. Let me know if you've got issues with it, because it's not SO's business to be honest with you ... 😉
Top comments (16)
The big question is what will AI scrape when it's destroyed all the sources of data.
With no repositorues of human intuitivity I suspect the power of ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Bard will be greatly diminished.
I'm curious too.
Multi modality, endless source of information 😉
In this day and age, a community-driven monolithic application like Stack Overflow, using ASP.NET and hosted on IIS in a self-hosted environment, appears to be reluctant to keep pace with modern technological advancements. Their failure to adapt to emerging tech trends and their complacency were the reasons for their downfall.
As the world started embracing Gen-AI, instead of following the trend with something of their own, they introduced a policy to discourage AI-generated answers.
Finally, they have introduced an AI assistant, but I'm afraid it's too little, too late.
I should have quoted that directly in the article 😉
Thank you :)
I’m not a professional programmer but I like to dabble. I’m working on a web project using Python Flask. Front end stuff in vanilla Javascript.
As I’m learning I often get stuck, so in the past I have asked lots of questions on Stack Overflow. I have been helped by the awesome community there, I’ve also had many questions go unanswered. Over the last few days, I’ve been playing with various AI tools like ChatGPT and it has already helped me with a number of small coding problems that I couldn’t figure out. Sometimes I’ve had to rephrase but so far it has given me sample code that works.
I’m a fan!
From now on it will be my first port of call. I’m sure I’ll still need to use Stack Overflow for super tricky stuff, but for help in using libraries or other less complex code, ChatGPT is pretty cool.
Will it replace Stack Overflow? Not for a while but it could.
Thank you for your opinion, maybe share some of your questions, especially where SO scored better, and/or ChatGPT scored better for context ...?
Developers who haven't started using ChatGPT will be obsolete. Period. No more wasting time scouring Google results to mostly only end up on StackOverflow and hope something will suffice.
The great thing about ChatGPT is, you can ask it a question, and no matter how simple or complex it is, it never downvotes you. Stackoverflow has some people that genuinely want to help, but it has many more people that genuinely just want to inflate their own egos.
I could have replaced every single argument I ever created with this simple sentence. Psst, I upvoted your comment ;)
The purpose of upvotes and downvotes is to tell you how reliable a post is. Sure, people may misuse it, but as a regular SO user I believe that accounts for very little people; often people think that they get downvoted so others can inflate their egos, but in reality they just got offended because their question/answer didn't match the standards of SO.
That being said, ChatGPT won't downvote you, but neither can anyone downvote it. There's no community to upvote and downvote specific ChatGPT responses, so you have no way of knowing the reliability of the answer (and if you do, what's the point of asking?).
Yes, I believe tools like Copilot can enhance productivity, but the purpose of StackOverflow is to teach you things you don't know, not make you work faster. ChatGPT has proven time and time again (personally, at least) that it's not (yet) capable of delivering reliable solutions to problems I genuinely do not know how to tackle. So for me the bottom line is this: if you're not a beginner developer and are actually tackling tough problems, ChatGPT seldom provides any helpful info (and often messes you up), and chances are, at that point, you know more than ChatGPT. On the other hand, if you search up a problem and see a SO question that at the least is similar to your problem, you already know you're issue is solved.
Yeah, there might be a future for ChatGPT, but at this point I think the decrease in SO usage will quickly be replenished when devs realize that AI just isn't there yet. Thus, if you have several years of experience, in my honest opinion, ChatGPT will put you nowhere ahead.
I believe artificial intelligence is making a positive impact on StackOverflow. Over time, we can anticipate an improvement in the caliber of questions and an overall increase in quality. Ultimately, the focus should be on the quality of content rather than its quantity.
StackOverflow is embracing the benefits of AI. There's undeniable value in having a diverse range of answers rather than solely relying on a singular AI-generated response. Furthermore, critically evaluating and rejecting AI-generated answers on StackOverflow plays a crucial role in refining the future resources for AI training. It's essential for us to consistently innovate and generate new ideas, rather than merely replicating or echoing what has been designed before.
I've seen a few articles like this one that leave out:
AI is hurting, but these articles aren't painting a full portrait of the situation.
Yes, they di so to try to fight the AI competition. Still the traffic is their problem, down 50% in 16 months ...
So information was intentionally omitted to reinforce a predetermined emotionally driven opinion?
I've never been much of a fan of SO, but I'm even less of a fan of that.
Did you read the article? Did you see the primary graphic? Psst, I block people who are rude. Just sayin' ...