Stack Overflow is unique as a page, in the sense that its contributions are under a license that allows for reuse (Creative Commons Share-Alike) as long as the individual users are properly credited. Does this mean that OverflowAI keeps the credit metadata and knows who wrote each individual part of an answer?
AI doesn’t work that way. No one wrote “part of the answer.” It’s more like each contributor casted a vote on what the next token should be and it randomly picks one of the top ten voted tokens. (Very very roughly.)
Fair enough, but at least there should be a way for OverflowAI to list which contributors had the strongest link to the given answer, right?
Edit: definitely read the other responses because apparently there are some techniques I wasn’t aware of and don’t understand nearly as well as I understand the underlying AI technology - and I’m only an enthusiast layman.
I don’t think there is any way of doing that. AI is like a huge matrix that says ‘if (’ is followed by
’ x’: 60%
’ foo’: 19%
’ person’: 9%
Etc.
And then it does it all over again for the next token based on randomly selecting one of the tokens and then saying ‘if ( person’ is followed by
‘.id’: 30%
‘.name’: 27%
Etc.
So just to write a simple ‘if person.name.startsWith(“foo”) {’ is the aggregate result of thousands of contributors - really pretty much every author of every code snippet ingested from the training material.
There is no single author even if the code matches existing code token for token. The only exception would be code that is so esoteric that there is only a single author writing code that does a particular thing. But even in that case, there is nothing in the probability matrix to indicate that a particular sequence of tokens is unique to a certain author. Best you could do is full text search a line of code to see if it matches anything in the training data and if there is a very small set of authors to whom credit might be assigned. That might be possible, but it would be an add-on (and significant performance hit) to the actual AI itself. Sort of like how browser integrated AI just runs a search and feeds the result into the context to make the output more likely to contain information in the top results.
Check out the article and feature video. It does appear to link to answers it pulled from. Bing and Bard do the same. Posters saying it’s impossible are mistaken.
