AI is learning from what you said on Reddit, Stack Overflow or Facebook. Are you OK with that?

— Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to train the next generation of artificial intelligence. Software developer Andy Rotering of Bloomington, Minnesota, has used Stack Overflow daily for 15 years and said he worries the company “could be inadvertently hurting its greatest resource” — the community of contributors who’ve donated time to help other programmers. Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said the company is trying to balance rising demand for instant chatbot-generated coding assistance with the desire for a community “knowledge base” where people still want to post and “get recognized” for what they’ve contributed. When some Stack Overflow users tried to delete their past comments after the Open AI partnership was announced, the company responded by suspending their accounts due to terms that make all contributions “perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow.” “We quickly addressed it and said, ‘Look, that’s not acceptable behavior’,” said Chandrasekar, describing the protesters as a small minority in the “low hundreds” of the platform’s 100 million users. Reddit has taken a different approach — partnering with AI developers like OpenAI and Google while also making clear that content can’t be taken in bulk without the platform’s approval by commercial entities “with no regard for user rights or privacy.” The deals helped bring Reddit the money it needed to debut on Wall Street in March, with investors pushing the value of the company close to $9 billion seconds after it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.