Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO

ardi60@reddthat.com to Technology@lemmy.ml – 303 points –
Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
bloomberg.com
103

Great. Now all the AI bots will just be saying "This" and "came here to say that."

"ChatGPT, solve this problem for me."

"As an AI language model, username checks out."

"poop knife xDD hehe"

There's so much actually great content posted across reddit over the years, it blows my mind that people decided that was something that needed to be mentioned all the time.

There are plenty of memorable stories from reddit, and some get mentioned regularly. It's a culture...

2 more...

Well... We all knew that was coming. If you still have an account haven't done so, now's a good time to purge your account!

Unless you live in the EU or California, odds are that just deletes the public data, I’m sure Reddit retains it and would sell it.

Even if you live in the EU or California. How would anyone know or prove in court that Reddit kept a copy?

by forcing them to actually be open about it (this will not happen)

Reddit account data has been training AI for over a decade. If you ever used it, you're already in a training set

That will remove your account from public view, but will it remove it from the data they use for AI training?

If not, you’re just enhancing the value of their proprietary data.

Why wouldn't they enhance it themselves, like Twitter has been doing for months? Once they make signing in mandatory and implement per-user rate limits the information will disappear from the internet and will only be available to people who are paying in some way.

Better yet, use an overwrite script to help turn their training models to jelly

I'd be very surprised if comments weren't versioned in some way, so even if you delete or rewrite that data, it's probably still there and a part of training data.

They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.

It's possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn't foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn't foresee changes to API pricing, he didn't foresee the protests, how long they'd last, or how many people just walked away.

Hell, in the previous big "closed subs" protest they'd never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn't break reddit.

I just don't see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn't have it anymore. Of course, it's still out there, in Google's cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it's no longer indeed reddit's control, and they won't be able to profit from it.

That's what I just did with my account of 10 years. I had all comments overwritten with gibberish and purged them a few days later. I'll send them a final DSGVO request and delete it afterwards.

Done it a few months ago but then again if I was working at reddit and in charge of preparing the dataset to feed to the llm, I'd give it access to both a recent one and a snapshot from before July 2023 (or whenever shit hit the fan and we all came to lemmy), most edits would have been made in protest. And AI can figure out which ones by itself

Why? How does it harm you in any meaningful way?

Even if it's just another scheme to further concentrate wealth (and it is at least that), that harms everyone but the 0.1%.

I draw plenty of benefit from AI tools. There are open source models that anyone can run.

My original question remains unanswered. "It may help someone I don't like because they are richer than me" is a pretty weak concept of "harm."

That argument is a very short (not very detailed) way of surmising the current issue with our world as a whole.

Don't like how cars have taken over the world, are the reason cities are hard to live in for low income families, and cause massive amount of climate damage? You can thank the 1% for that.

Frustrated with how you don't really own anything, your digital "property" can be taken away from you at a moments notice, and that everything you enjoy gets stuffed with schemes to make more money off of vulnerable people? You can thank the 1% for that.

Angered that health care costs truly absurd amounts, that medicine is sold to the consumer with a 10,000% mark up, or that a single accident that was not their fault could land someone in debt for life? You can thank the 1% for that.

A disturbing amount of things that are not good for our planet, keep the poor people poor, and generate inferior products/experiences is directly because of the insane power that the rich hold over our worlds systems.

"It helps someone I don't like because they are richer than me" is actually a wonderful definition of harm.

Reddit used to be an amazing place of community and content that you couldn't find anywhere on the internet. Then in the pursuit of money and the power that the 1% have Reddit (the company) started implementing practices that actively made the experience worse for the user, violated a person's ownership of their content, and removed choice just like authoritative/dictatorship governments do.

It feels to most people that there is nearly nothing that can be done about it. So when a person has the opportunity to directly go against the rich caste in our world they will take that opportunity immediately.

I recommend taking a hard look at the things that concern you with our world, or cause you pain/annoyance/discomfort and try and learn WHY the issue is the way it is. The majority of the time is because some rich person/group of people (I'm looking at you lobby groups) has an obscene amount of power compared to all of the people affected.

Lastly there is a reason that "Tax the rich/Eat the rich" is the rally cry of generations.

It's because the rich cause us harm.

Completely unrelated to anything my post said.

I was directly addressing all of the points you raised.

You said it concentrates wealth, but open source does the opposite of that - it allows small companies and individuals to earn money using the technology without having to pay for its use.

You said it "harms everyone but the 0.1%." I am benefited by it, not harmed, and I am very much not part of the 0.1%.

You're hallucinating. (Pun intended.)

Neither Capt. Wolf nor I said a single thing about AI or Open Source. And the article didn't mention anything about Open Source.

No, I said things about AI and open source. I raised open source as part of my counter to your argument that this is "concentrating wealth."

Here, I'll explain in detail what's going on.

In response to an article about Reddit licensing your content to AI trainers, capt_wolf said "it's time to purge your account." Presumably as a way to stop that from happening. I asked why that was a bad thing, specifically how it harmed us in any meaningful way. You came in at that point and suggested:

  • It's a scheme to further concentrate wealth
  • It harms everyone but the 0.1%.

I raised open source as a counter to the "wealth concentration" point, because open source does the opposite - it spreads the wealth to any who want it. It puts these resources into the commons.

I also pointed out that I personally benefit from AI tools, so it does the opposite of harming me. As I am not part of the 0.1%, that's a counter to your second point.

So they're cashing in by selling other people's conversations.

Yeah.

FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

Their post history was discoverable by using " site:reddit.com" on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

What happens if you edit every other post with absolute nonsense sentences? I doubt they have a way to go through that?

Are you saying the original answers are not nonsense already?

Lol no. I just really want to invent some insane words, forget about them and then see them years later in some media publication that wasn't properly reviewed and edited.

I think in theory simple check such as edits to the majority of a profile would be enough to detect it.

This is how I cleaned (most) of my old posts: Searched them via Google. As they’re posted under my username I was able to change them into nonsense before deleting then. Even though they never appeared under my profile anymore.

No, that's Google keeping the content of the pages they scraped at the time they scraped them.

Imagine AI mods trained by reddit mod models.

You know how artists can poison their images for AI... We need a way to poison content on Reddit

I would say most of the content is already poison.

If you're talking about Glaze or Nightshade, those techniques are not proven to be particularly effective. Lots of people want them to work but that doesn't make it so.

Shit posts would do it. That'll turn the AIs into morons who spurt out "rizz" and "skibidi" instead of anything useful

I am waiting for an LLM that trained on 4chan it would be pure gold.

Not good enough it only trained on /pol/ it seems

Alt title: Reddit looking to steal value from their millions of free users

It's a power grab. They'll justify control over the training data with intellectual property which keeps it out of the hands of everyday people but they stole the "intellectual property" from us in the first place. Then they'll control the "means of generation".

I'm just wondering what the hell they're expecting to teach this AI off Reddit user data. Reddit has been scraped for years and most of what could have been learned has already been used I'd assume.

Reddit has been more and more video based lately and it feels to me like it is becoming a less algorithmic version of TikTok.

Spez has spent his entire time as CEO chasing the latest tech shiny - reddit crypto, reddit NFTs, reddit video a la TikTok. And he's always managed to do it after the craze has started to peak. So now he's chasing the latest shiny, reddit AI, starting a full year after everyone else already released their products.

He's late yet again, and he's proven repeatedly that's he's failed to understand reddit's greatest strengths and value. This "reddit AI content" and the IPO is his last chance to get some value out of reddit, and his last chance to make money for nothing because no one is going to hire him in a leadership role ever again. I just wonder if he's smart enough to understand that, or whether he's just hoping to get enough money to fully build out and stock his personal doomsday bunker.

Pretend your Spez. You know that, but will your investors? Investors now a days just toss money at anything with the word AI.

To have better bots so they can advertise via posts and make it seem like a human recommended it. That's why a lot of people started using Reddit in the first place. Myself included. Only time I use it now it's when a search result takes me there. Can't remember the last time it was a useful result though.

This is why I deleted my posts. Also, 60 million is a jokingly lowball figure.

I wonder how reddit users feel about this. I wouldn't know, I DNS blocked the site months ago.

This is going to produce the saltiest AI the world has ever seen.

"Hey reddit ai , give me an idea how to balance my budget and pay my student debt, mate". "here ya go, I got a noose for you. Also I'm not your mate, dude".

" Hey reddit ai, draw for me a house with a genz family". Here ya go. " Hey reddit ai, why did you show me a pic of a highway ramp with homeless people?"

Just think, in 1000 years your body will be long dead but you'll be forced to live on as a poster! Death is not an option. 😌

what could go wrong with training your ai based on the posts of the most racist and misogynistic people on the internet?

It’s not 4chan… but someone did train one of those once.

That varies by subreddit, which might actually help in training LLMs to recognize the difference.

I stopped posting there the moment they pulled the trigger on the API change. I used to like cruising LinuxQuestions and answering people, too.

I wouldn't like having my Shitposts harvested.

I so want to see Reddit die. I browsed the site for the first time in 2007. I adored it. Now it is nothing but a cesspool of morons trying to find an echo chamber for their idiocy, led by king of the morons, Spez.

It’s time for better competition in this space and the Fediverse is one step toward that goal.