New technologies and innovations do not happen in a vacuum. For every development, there’s a generation of researchers, engineers, and inventors who spend countless hours brainstorming solutions. Before the internet, this community would congregate at in-person conferences and seminars, where the knowledge they’d distilled was shared and discussed. With the advent of the World Wide Web, online Q&A communities like Experts Exchange, Quora, and Stack Overflow became the new tech town squares for collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas, but that has changed thanks to large language models (LLMs) and AI platforms.
Unlike human experts, LLMs have no original insights. Instead, they’re pre-trained using large datasets from existing work in books, articles, websites, and even Q&A platforms. Until recently, most Q&A platforms had strict policies against LLM usage, rightly claiming that doing so would feed the machines with member contributions for free.
“If a user is believed to have used ChatGPT after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed to prevent users from continuing to post such content, even if the posts would otherwise be acceptable,” Stack Overflow warned its community on December 5, 2022. However, the platform recently announced a partnership with OpenAI that many users criticized for contradicting the previous policy.
“We’re thrilled to announce we’re partnering with @OpenAI to bring best-in-class technical knowledge and the world’s most popular LLM models for AI development together! This groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI will drive our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge,” the team posted to X on May 6. Many Stack Overflow users called the company out for what they viewed as “selling out,” and a sizable number even declared they were leaving the platform.
Data scraping by LLMs is not uncommon, especially on open-source platforms. “There’s never such thing as a free lunch,” an insider at Experts Exchange maintains. “You either have a free site, where your data and contributions are being sold, or you are part of a paid site, where your data and content are secure.”
As one of the oldest Q&A platforms for the tech community, EE operates on a “credit card required” model that keeps the platform private. In fact, most other open-source platforms were developed as free versions of EE to reach developers who protested the paid membership model. With the new development, EE has temporarily amended its policy in a bid to attract developers who’ve suddenly found themselves without an online home.
Beginning on June 5, Experts Exchange will allow new members to join the community (ask and answer questions, earn points and rewards, solve difficult problems) for free, no credit card required, for 90 days. “This is a departure from our typical ‘credit card required’ model that has at times frustrated users,” the platform acknowledges. They’re also steadfast in their LLM policy.
“We stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide,” Experts Exchange reiterates. “We have never and will never sell any member data, content, or likeness.” The team is also opposed to using LLM on the platform. “Our platform is built on authentic human-to-human interaction: moderators don’t allow the direct use of LLM content in our threads.”
Experts Exchange usually offers a 7-day free trial with a credit card. For this campaign, it will provide a 90-day free trial without one.
