Reddit wants AI companies to pay up for using their content

MANILA, Philippines – Reddit on Tuesday, April 18, announced its plans to make companies pay up if it’s going to use its content for training artificial intelligence such as large language models including ChatGPT. 

Reddit, in its forums, hosts lively conversations in its online forums across almost any topic. Users are mostly anonymous so discussions are often not as inhibited as compared to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, where what users post can have an impact on one’s reputation. 

Reddit has also been useful for users looking for advice based on another user’s personal experience. 

As such, the data can be valuable to an AI model such as ChatGPT, and Google’s Bard. These are conversations on which these AI tools can be trained further. These two AI tools have already been historically trained on Reddit data, and now Reddit plans to charge for that. 

In a blog post about its updates pertaining to third party usage of its API (application programming interface), Reddit said, “We are introducing a new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.” 

An API is a way for a platform such as Reddit to offer services to another platform such as ChatGPT and Bard. In this case, that means access to Reddit’s user-generated data troves and conversations. 

Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO, told the New York Times, “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation…There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A. (Alcoholics Anonymous), or never at all.”

Huffman said that Reddit’s “corpus of data is really valuable,” but that they “don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Researchers using Reddit’s API for academic and non-commercial purposes, as well as developers building tools for Reddit users will continue to have free access to the API.

Interestingly, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman served briefly as CEO of Reddit in 2014.

Reddit is also preparing for a possible initial public offering in the second half of this year. – Rappler.com