Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 275 points – Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
bloomberg.com

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO::Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.

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They were transparent about it. AI and gatekeeping the user generated comments was the deciding factor to close the API and that's what they told the public.

IIRC that was not the case. They very publicly blamed 3rd party apps, which was both disingenuous and not transparent.

Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

I can't speak to the article that you've posted several times due to the paywall, but I can speak to the language and the antagonistic attitude they actually used during the entire debacle. Placing explicit blame on third party apps like Apollo, Sync, Boost, etc.- that was the argument used. It doesn't matter what the real reason was. They were publicly placing blame on small fish instead of the AI monster that was stealing all of their content and bandwidth

I understand. But I think from the get go of the announcement of closing the API's, Reddit had always discussed not wanting to be harvested by AI tech for free. The point is they saw the value of their user content, and wanted to establish a model to profit on that. This announcement is just that; they now have something in market to allow AI to be trained on it's user generated content.

That is absolutely not the case. They stated a lot of different reasons, ranging from “these freeloading third party developers are making money off our hard work and should be paying” to “we’ve been doing this for free and it costs us a lot of money.”

What you’re thinking of, is the fact that everyone was well aware of the truth, and the fact that they were just butt hurt about the fact that AI was being trained on the data and they didn’t get a cut.

So they did the same thing, and just fucked everyone over.

If it was just about monetizing scraping for AI models, they could have easily had different pricing for AI uses than they did for 3rd party apps.

If it was about the lost revenue from the lack of ads on third party apps, they only needed to give existing 3rd party apps a longer period of time to transition their business models. 3rd party app users would have been paying way more than Reddit was losing from the lack of ads.

No Reddit wanted to kill off the third party apps. They used the AI scraping as an excuse to shut them down. They wanted to force people onto their shitty app.

I don’t know what their actual reasoning for that is, but there’re basically two possibilities I can think of:

  1. Their executive team and board of directors is ridiculously incompetent.

  2. Their shitty 1st party app is harvesting significantly more data about you than the 3rd party apps did, and they can sell that data for more than the $2-5 per user per month they would be getting if they gave the 3rd party apps time to transition to a paid business model.