Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT | Tom's Hardware

This seems like a smart move for a company that's struggling financially.

Companies like this really are failing to think long term. AIs cannot create new content. All they can do is rehash their training data, because they're effectively a glorified autocomplete. So in a few years time, Stack Overflow will have new questions on it, some of which will relate to new problems. Those questions will require humans with real knowledge and understanding to answer them, and where's the motivation for anybody to do that if their answer will immediately be fed into an AI? In the long-term AIs will be useless because they can't advance or update without new content, and humans are being disincentivised from creating new content by companies who want to make a quick buck selling their content without compensating them.

Welp. If SO had been usable for the past decade, that would've been a real blow.

Fuckin' told ya