50
$\begingroup$

Stack Exchange has some kind of new AI agreement with Google, as announced in their blog.

I’m just trying to get caught up myself here on what exactly is going on, but one real possibility is that Stack Exchange’s army of unpaid curators of a Stack Exchange dataset has just become an army of unpaid curators for a proprietary Google dataset.

Given that MathOverflow is an independent entity which is merely hosted on Stack Exchange servers, it behooves us to get to the bottom of this and decide what we think about it. We always have the nuclear option of leaving Stack Exchange altogether.

Question 1: What exactly are the terms of Stack Exchange’s agreement with Google?

Question 2: How do these terms apply to MathOverflow in particular?

Question 3: Are we happy with these terms?

Question 4: Should we try to negotiate any kind of changes?

$\endgroup$
8
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Related Stack Overflow blog post: Defining socially responsible AI: How we select partners $\endgroup$
    – The Amplitwist
    Commented Mar 12 at 20:16
  • 14
    $\begingroup$ These are good questions. Is there any way we can get an official representative from Stack Exchange to answer them? $\endgroup$
    – Sam Hopkins
    Commented Mar 12 at 21:13
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Stack Exchange Inc has been thirsting to get into the AI space for a while now. Their own attempts at using AI have been...not wildly successful. Selling the human-curated data with its community-generated quality signals is the next best thing, I guess. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts Mod
    Commented Mar 12 at 22:38
  • 21
    $\begingroup$ SE publishes a quarterly data dump, so I suspect that everyone is already using their data to train AIs, exactly like they're using other copyrighted content all over the internet. $\endgroup$
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Mar 13 at 7:57
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ @FedericoPoloni For what it's worth, they did stop doing this last summer (see this answer and the question) and started again, very likely under the heavy pressures from users and admins of the network. $\endgroup$
    – Johan
    Commented Mar 13 at 13:13
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ Is one of the mathoverflow overlords Anton Geraschenko still affiliated with google?: research.google/people/anton-geraschenko $\endgroup$
    – joro
    Commented Mar 13 at 16:53
  • 13
    $\begingroup$ Here's a basic question: Is SE getting any money from Google? If so, is MO seeing any of that money? $\endgroup$
    – Timothy Chow
    Commented Mar 24 at 14:17
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ The question could be broadened to include meta.stackexchange.com/questions/399619, or should this be a new question? $\endgroup$
    – Ben
    Commented May 7 at 19:11

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .