It is; however, I doubt most contributors would put in effort if they knew the main purpose of what they were typing out and researching would be grist for a for-profit (let's not kid ourselves) AI business.
It's always been typed out to further a for profit business. The AI part is new. Stack Overflow has never been shy about the fact that they're trying to make money.
If the AI changes things, then one should ask why the individual was contributing when Stack Overflow Inc was the business reaping the financial rewards of community contributions.
The contributions are under CC-BY-SA, so while the company can legitimately profit from it, the ShareAlike part requires that derivative works are also distributed under the same license. This is the part that LLMs infringe upon, in my opinion. So, all I want is for OpenAI, Meta etc to release their model weights under CC-BY-SA, and then we're square.
I'm sure that's the legislation they will lobby through if the courts don't play ball. But from a purely ethical standpoint I find it repugnant when people like Sam Altman take something that is offered for free specifically with the intent that it benefits the commons, and make a commercial enterprise out of it.
That's indeed a large part of why I stopped writing new questions and answers. But I do still edit, and redirect old duplicates to a better version of the question, etc. - because high quality information deserves to be highlighted, even if it may "fall into the wrong hands".
