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Earlier today I edited my (small) set of Stack Overflow posts to add the sentence "I do not consent to my words being used to train OpenAI" to the end. Within hours, all these edits were reversed and I got a warning email for "removing or defacing content". I did not remove any content. If this small sentence is "defacing", it is a very minor defacement. In no way was the experience of other users made worse by me adding one sentence.

To Stack Overflow, you are not a person. You are "content".

Not only does Stack Overflow say you don't have a right to remove your words from Stack Overflow, according to Stack Overflow, you don't even have the right to decide what words Stack Overflow publishes under your name.

In the meantime, I have been suspended for 17 hours to "cool down". OpenAI is so, so offended by me saying I don't want them to train on my content. Clearly I am very angry and need to sit in time out.

Noticed this last detail only when I tried to edit my profile and discovered you can't edit your profile while "suspended".

@mcc

huh. I thought the LLMs were already trained on StackOverflow.

It's available under some kind of public license, I think. There are a bunch of clone page out there, anyway.

@WomanCorn If the point of Stack Overflow is to be a block of programming-related text to sell to LLM companies, then it would actually be rational to ban LLM text, as it would poison the LLM inputs.

@mcc @WomanCorn can they detect it reliably enough, though? If one can't delete answers, one can always poison the well with LLM generated answers.