Scraping By Stack Overflow, the go-to forum for programmers and software developers, announced a partnership with OpenAI to sell the site’s data — including its users’ forum posts — to train ChatGPT. But the move has proved highly controversial. As Tom’s Hardware reports, many Stack Overflow users are now attempting to edit or remove their posts to protest their answers being used to bolster OpenAI’s large language model. That mild disobedience has incurred bans by Stack Overflow’s moderators, who say the deletions go against the site’s policy. One Stack Overflow user by the name of Ben, who claims to be a UI programmer at Epic Games, said they were suspended for seven days for editing their highest-rated answers in protest, writing in one post: “Why does OpenAI get to profit from our work?” “It’s just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit,” the user wrote in a thread on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you.” So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. pic.twitter.com/4TyGiPrTYF — ben ui (@_benui) May 6, 2024 Stacked Against ‘Em Ben and others cite the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as giving them the right to delete all data pertaining to them from…Stack Overflow Bans Users for Protesting Against It Selling Their Answers to OpenAI as Training Data