[The Guardian] There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that what really made me delete my account early (I initially wanted to wait until the 30th to see how things play out) was the ridiculous number of people defending this bullshit and promoting the official Reddit app as the superior option.

Some going as far as saying 3rd party devs are leeches and scammers.

I can only tolerate so much stupidity and ignorance before I bail.

spez should start paying the redditors, especially the mods, with that logic. He gets it all for free and now he wants to profit while we would have to pay.

It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.

I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.

I don’t really understand this whole fediverse thing yet, but what I do know is… screw Reddit and screw u/spez.

My favorite things about this whole debacle is how transparent they're being about how the plan the whole time was to actually just hope we would keep giving them content and moderating for free forever so they could package it up and sell it to wall street. And not just them but all social media companies seem to think this will just work and nobody will mind.

It’s over u/spez I have the high ground

If they are going to capitalise on our content and data, are they going to start paying out to users like YouTube and other platforms?

It is rather interesting to note that this Corpus of data may not be as valuable if it cannot be used without always being legally in several grey areas (perhaps even red areas in some jurisdictions).

Currently, an increasingly large pool of artist/writters/singers and other people (even corporations such as studios and large right holders) are exercising their rights to not have their creations and derived works be used or slurped into AI models without their express consent.

Corporations making use of those AI models may find themselves in expensive legal limbo now and the foreseeable future.

Considering no redditor imagined nor consented to have their post and comment history be comprehensively abused (as in "improper treatment or usage; application to a wrong or bad purpose; an unjust, corrupt or wrongful practice or custom").

We may enter a period where lawlessness pervades AI models (just like any gold rush, for example the current crypto craze). Eventually, the legal framework will catch up and will probably make any dubious Corpus of data untouchable.

How long this takes is anyone's guess. I surmise several large profile lawsuits would suffice.

Wide op for ai scraping and nothing are not the only two options. They could easily limit api calls to what would be good for single users or mods and have each user generate their own key. Apps could let users input their key. Most users wouldn't bother and would switch to their app anyway so it would get them 95% or what they claim to want without being a dick about it.

Funniest thing to do is honestly replace your old comments with ChatGPT refusals. If you put "As an AI language model" everywhere, it'll really mess with the ML algorithms to make your data useless.

I removed my content on that site in protest, and will continue to do so as it creeps back in right up to the day when either my every last comment is scrubbed, or I am locked out of my accounts.

No quarter.

I am enjoying being able to observe this story from the beginning, before the media started writing about it. It's been an interesting few weeks.

I said it with Facebook and would do the same for Reddit, I would happily pay a little each month to not have my data sold or used inappropriately and be ad free.

This whole thing is fascinating to me. It's like the creation of a universe laid out before us. I'm striving to be better, better than the one before, so the next one can be even better. I don't need no money in my soup. I only need my hands, if that.

It’s all user generated content,all they need to do is to shut up and let people run

This was my thought as well, I actually don’t mind OpenAI trawling my content to train their models, I’m benefiting from their end product in so many ways already. The internet was always public, no one asked for stupid ceos to step in and stop that. How is it Ok for Google webcrawlers, but not OpenAI? Also it’s not like I can monitise my posts and comments myself on my own anyway.

The whole locking down the API due to AI model scraping excuse was poor, it should be a decision for the community of reddit.

Starting to wonder if Reddit are going to train their own AI models or have already started.

Also, that journalist from the guardian, if you go to the website linked, looks like an older John Oliver or John Oliver’s dad 😂

Ugh. Poignant few paragraphs. Such a flippant and pugnacious individual. Sophistic and specious reasoning won't undo this sliver of time - this is his gift unto himself. Pariah, perhaps. How does an individual see the results of their actions, know that they can never be undone and be, well, without conscience, for the forseable future? Our actions are literally life's ink. We can't roll the clock back. Our name/stamp/signature is on our every/very breath. Regret, if our chemistry allows, - sorry, gotta go, my mums here, fuck off ..

Spez doesn't care anyways. He will demand his way no matter what.

Good article, this one is spot on.