Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now, Thanks to AI Deal

coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 156 points –
Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal
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It's a bit of a dilemma reading their policy:

We believe in the open internet and in keeping Reddit publicly accessible to foster human learning (...) Unfortunately, we see more and more entities using unauthorized access (...) especially with the rise of use cases like generative AI. This sort of misuse of public data has become more prominent as more and more platforms close themselves off from the open internet.
We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

Being a open/public platform, but still wanting to protect user's content from being used for AI could be a good thing, and I guess also what many fediverse users would want for this platform. Making a distinction between AI and search indexing could indeed be difficult. But then making content deals with Google for search indexing and AI training is a bit hypocrite.

We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

You need to pay us for the right to misuse our site's data!

I still don’t buy that protecting people’s content from being read by AI is a good thing. I think the fear of AI stealing our thunder or whatever by reading what we’ve written is overblown as a fear.