Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.
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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!
Reddit account data has been training AI for over a decade. If you ever used it, you're already in a training set
Better yet, use an overwrite script to help turn their training models to jelly
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.
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.
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.
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