Reddit has struck a $60m deal with Google that lets the search giant train AI models on its posts

mesamune@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 293 points – Reddit has struck a $60m deal with Google that lets the search giant train AI models on its posts
fortune.com

Its a bit old, but I just learned it via the retro-dodo article here: https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/

89

ChatGPT4: tl;dr The universe is bigger than we thought.

ChatGPT5: fuck spez

Wrong company, it would be Gemini in this case

I thought it was "Bard Gemini Bard Bard Advanced AI Ultra Gemini Premium ProMax!"

Is it just me or are 60 million a ridiculously small price for that whole dataset?

To be fair it's a pretty terrible dataset. The AI is just going to say "this" to every question you ask

Hey, now, be fair. There are some Top 40s song lyrics in there too.

Yeah and Google already has everything scrapped and indexed

3 more...

Perhaps, but not worth buying if you can't make profit or keep it from your competition.

60M is for over almost 20 years of data, but once it's ingested, google will only want new content. Next year, it'll be more like 3M if the dataset isn't poisoned by bots or the AI fad hasn't collapsed. Reddit will struggle with finances again and users will suffer. At least that's my prediction.

Spez has already grifted his money out of the initial stock pump so it literally doesn't matter. Reddit could shut down tomorrow and he'd be happy as a clam.

Yeah, what a load. Though now they can boot his arse and save.

Edited to remove number.

I doubt he's getting 120M per year. I think that big compensation package was a 1 time deal. That's more than Satya Nadella makes.

You're right. Total compensation was $193M for 2023 but that was a lot of stock too. It may have been one time like you said now that they went public. Hopefully enough to retire haha.

the AI fad

LOL. Do you realize that makes you sound like Boomers talking about the internet in the late 90's and early 00's?

Haha! Wow I guess so. I'll keep some shelf space available in the geezer museum next to 3D TV's, deep fakes, fidget spinners, and my pogs. :D

It currently looks very much like a bubble. After the dot com bubble, the internet didn't go away, but most companies died off and all the stupid monetisation went bankrupt.

We may be seeing something similar

I wonder if Google's unlimited legal budget plays a role. Not a lawyer, so probably way off here...

But, for example, reddit's success in part depends on Google ingesting their data --- reddit shows up in Google searches all the time, which can only happen if Google uses reddit's content. So reddit telling Google "you can't use our content" doesn't work, and they need to say something like, "you can use our content for search results but you can't consume it as training data."

This is a pretty straightforward statement/request/demand, but one could imagine Google lawyers maliciously complying and throwing their hands up dramatically, claiming "well we use some amount of AI in our search results, so if we can't use your content for AI training then we can't risk using it for search results." Which would, I imagine, really, really hurt reddit (no Google results would be catastrophic I suspect).

So, perhaps the "low" 60M figure is just Google using their leverage.

Or not. As a random person on the Internet, I can say I'm probably not contributing anything meaningful here...

How quickly you forget that half of it is just "I also choose this guy's wife" and "the narwhal bacon's at midnight"

I'm personally curious whether Reddit actually has any ability to protect that database. I don't remember Reddit TOS, but usually those things give them license to use and copy the data, maybe even to sell it, but not actually the copyright on it. So if someone made a Reddit scraper and copied the comments, wouldn't only the actual commenter be able to sue?

$60M may be reflecting that, in that it's more a convenience fee to shield Google against individual Redditors going after them than something that Reddit itself could actually sue over.

Considering it's all full of Nazis and bots, and if you get to filter all of them out you're left with reposts and low quality memes followed by comments that represent the hostile side of each of us.... I'd say anything over $5 is a good deal for spez.

Now, I hope Google uses this data exclusively for detecting inappropriate answers. Can you imagine it giving answers based on the endless threads i of " I'm not your mate, bro; I'm not your bro, dude.....".

3 more...

Can't wait to see an AI chatbot in my Google searches that behaves like a typical redditor.

"Hey Google AI, could you help me find a way to do _____?"

"Why the hell would you want that? Are you stupid? There's like 15 better ways to accomplish what I think your peanut brain is trying to accomplish."

"... nevermind Google."

I mean one of the most popular search types on Google is so not much would change

-- Hey Google/reddit, what does xxxxxx mean?

--Wtf is people so lazy, Google it yourself it's only 5 seconds!

--But but, you are Google, are you not?

--Buahaha , haha!

Google: "I'm looking to make an AI that's incredibly opinionated, confidently incorrect, and prone to circlejerk behaviors."

Spez: "I mean OpenAI pretty much did that already, but if you want to pay me to recreate that then I got you."

One thing that doesn't seem to get brought up is the AI porn angle. Gonewild is pretty big on reddit still. A lot of OnlyFans creators, and general perverts (respect). Reddit wants to commodify this content, so those people are selling the images of their bodies so AI can make porn of random strangers. Kinda fucked when you think about it.

Steve Huffman looks increasingly douchier and shittier with every passing photo.

What a damn chode. Fuck that guy.

Oh no, my thousands of identical messages!

God, the taste their AI is about to garner for coconuts.

Like they don't have the data prior to the overwrite... These tools need to update over time

And this is how Skynet was born.

That one Microsoft Twitter bot turned into a full blown Nazi in just one day.

I can't even imagine how fucked up and depraved one trained on Reddit data will get.

I hope AI sais fuck Spez a lot:-)

You can be sure the little fucker hired people to filter out that sort of stuff from the data

Can someone point me the way of that bot or whatever that changes all your old Reddit posts before deleting them? I thought I had it saved somewhere but I can't find it now and have no idea what it's called.

They keep copies of posts because people who mass edited their posts saw them reverted or have people reply still as if they were not edited.

Plus they can easily just detect mass edits, and ship the state prior to that event.

I had read that with some people, is was a delay from their server instance between read/write and in the end the changes did end up sticking, but I don't know if that was true. A lot of people were mass editing at the same time, and since editing isn't something that happens super frequently, it might have less priority in the stack and caused backups.

They change it on their website but the data that's collected and sold isn't changed.

It still devalues their google search though but also makes it harder to scrap data for free and ups the value of what they are selling.

For sure. They definitely have change records for everything. It would be borderline negligent if they didn't.

As part of the deal, spez will personally train the AI Jailbait Model.

They can have my drunk shitposts. Jokes on them for buying my garbage.

is there a way to mass delete my old content? the service i used in the past doesn't seem to have worked. i recently got a reply from a 6 year-old post from someone saying they got there on google.

My understanding is that the mass delete you did probably had worked, but reddit rolled back your deletions. I heard it happened to a lot of mass deleters after the lemmy exodus.

Is worse nothing gotten really deleted admins admitted in like 2018 that they can see deleted posts. I think even some mods can. The access they give to Google is to the backend they can see EVERYTHING.

Can we still mass edit our previous comments with random stuff, a little bit at a time to avoid detection? Poison the data, yada yada.

I think I'm gonna be sick. so all the stuff I wrote, it's just THERE? what the fuck do i do? what about private info that I dont want on a public fucking search engine?? I've had that account since I was a kid, there's a lot of shit I regret posting, what the FUCK!

Yes but they just reverse it. That ship has sailed.

That's not great news when weighed against my desire to watch reddit crash and burn.

All we can do is make something better, reddit will do their thing and we will do ours.

I wonder how they will decide how to dole that out to their contributors… oh, wait.

At first, I thought he was holding a big pile of cash in the thumbnail.

It's self hosted plus open source, or barbarism.

You think... "Y sucks, I'm switching to Z".

But Z just is biding its time till it can be Y. The most principled owners in existence have a finite life span. It is only a matter of time till the vultures put their claws into anything.

Gabe is gonna die, steam is gonna be fucked. We should have all started with Good Old Games. But we didn't. But it's not to late to switch. To be free with your software. Don't be like me, wishing you had been smarter before.

It's okay, better now then never.

In the case of steam and gog, steam was around a lot longer before gog. I only purchase what I must on steam, and if it's available on both I always purchase from gog. They more align with my values. But valve from my point of view is such a prosumer business I don't mind. But you're right. When Gabe goes, I'm willing to bet some cock sucker ceo from oracle or ibm will swoop in and fuck the whole thing up.