LLMs and Digital Public Goods

ChatGPT’s release coincided with a sharp, sustained drop in Stack Overflow activity, raising concerns about the future of open knowledge sharing.

Impact on Digital Public Goods. We study the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on digital public goods, focusing on Stack Overflow. We estimate a 16% decrease in weekly posts on Stack Overflow after the release of ChatGPT, escalating to 25% by June. This widespread LLM adoption might diminish public web exchanges, thereby constraining the open data available for future learning. Read more