Reddit signs $60M contract allowing AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content
Reddit signs $60M contract allowing AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content
Remember the whole "if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product"?
It wasn't enough to turn you into a product. Now they also want to turn you into a resource. Farming your comments and posts to feed to an AI model.
What an economy we've built.
I wonder why I don't pay for Lemmy.
The kind of frightening thing is that anyone could start an instance on the Fediverse, collect all the posts and comments coming in as all instances usually do and then use it to do the same thing, and I'm not sure there's currently anything (legally or otherwise) stopping them.
But at least we have the option to defederate such an instance. If we can find out which ones do it...
At least for the instance this was posted on: the February 2024 Beehaw Financial Update
You don't have to, but the owners of your instance are probably paying out of pocket to keep it online. I'm sure they're taking donations
That's why I'm on Lemmy. At least when they train AI on my posts here it's not legitimized by some contract.
That AI is going to get really racist, really fast, judging by the muck we all saw daily on Reddit.
Although it's going to be really good at anime porn too. So there's that.
If that's your thing, then hell yeah brother!
Damn just 60 mil??
Like seriously, this must be fake. Add a zero and I'd still find it suspiciously cheap.
Yeah, the diarrhea of my shitposts over there alone is worth more, it's what will make the future AI kinda smart & very depressed.
And that's why I deleted all my posts and comments before deleting my account. Sure, they could probably go back and restore it if they wanted but, so far, they haven't.
Glad I landed here on Lemmy.
I deleted all my comments last year. Recently I got a notification for a response in one of such comments. When I clicked the notification link, my comment and the response were visible. The comment doesn't show up in my profile.
Interesting. I've specifically searched for some fairly unique content (Python scripts, etc) I posted in my time over there, and it hasn't shown up at all.
So you left your Reddit account intact?
Edit: Fucking. Cunts. I just searched (had been a few months) and at least some of my data is back. I reckon they've done it ahead of the planned AI move and IPO.
Edit 2: joke's on them - my posts were linked to an alt account I setup on Pastebin years ago. Still had the creds, so have deleted the pastes. Fuck Reddit. 🤘
Reddit was aggressively rate limiting tools used to delete and edit content in a funny way when the API pricing was announced. The API wouldn’t return an error, the rate limiting was silent, and the tools would report successful deletion or edits even when the edit or deletion wasn’t made.
I had to modify an existing script to handle the 5-second rate limit and, lieu of deleting, I just rewrote each comment with a farewell.
Even then I did 3 passes (minor additional edits) in cases Reddit was saving previous edits.
My content has stayed edited.
I've had the same experience. Most scripts just erase the comments available directly through your reddit profile, which is limited to the most recent ~2000 posts that you've made. To fully erase anything and everything, you need to request all your data from reddit, download the .zip and feed it into an application like shreddit.
Yep used 'power delete suite' to delete everything before I left.
I suspect Reddit holds a perfect copy of every edit, including the first, you’ve ever done. For legal reasons if nothing else. Now also to prevent against perfectly good AI training content to be deleted.
Yeah! Here, no one gets paid when someone else wants to profit off of all the free user generated content. Wait, what was our goal again?
Trained on 99% reposts
And the outputs of bots. There has been a shocking increase in auto-generated comments on reddit in the past years and it's turning the training data into a minefield.
Haven't touched reddit socially in 8 months, but every now and then I'll use it to search for opinions or instructions on things. Searched "reddit best domain registrar" recently and landed on a thread where top to bottom, every comment recommending a registrar was from a bot and/or banned account. No real person testimonials, all ads. And as AI implementations improve, that's going to get harder to spot. In the meantime, I'm formatting searches like "best domain registrar lemmy" because reddit is legit that bad rn.
Just in time to make new AI generated shitposts with AI generated replies & pump up those numbers for the IPO.
Can't wait to read a post about how a novice AI finds it hard to animate human hands and some other AI suggest studying hentai porn to get the finger/tentacles movements just right. And ofc lots of ads. From AIs, to AIs, by AIs, for AIs.
r/TotallyNotRobots is spreading everywhere.
Reddit is run by pigeons and other birds/drones confined. Actually we always knew that.
We all knew it was coming, but it's still disappointing
Funny, I don't see anyone saying the AI companies have free right to Reddit's content.
Can users opt out? Because the content belong to the users
my layman understanding would be, that they include it in the TOS and your only option would be to leave the platform and demand them to delete all your content, which they may or may not do. E.g. they could just train the AI on an older backup. Good luck getting your rights recognized and abided by.
The content belongs to users... they just license it to Reddit, for Reddit to do as it pleases:
$60m doesn't seem like that much in an era where twitter could (have been) sold for $40b.
so the API thing was over nothing? brilliant
No, it was just preemptive to enforce control over who can programmatically read the site
Add the bot problem to it and you'll get garbage in, garbage out
Hell even the users didn't exactly contribute good quality content.
We did it reddit, we trained an AI to be the pure embodiment of cringe.
Lol, so they're going to be training their AI on... AI generated content? The uptick in that shit on reddit has made it more annoying than usual.
That and all the confidently incorrect shit on the site... Not to mention the constant in-jokes. I'm just imagining a chatbot responding to something about how to deal with grief with "I also choose this man's dead wife!"
Can't see how this could possibly go wrong.
They are gonna love it when their chatbot also chooses that man's dead wife.
There's gonna be so many bots commenting "Actually...." Followed by the most incorrect information about the topic at hand possible.
Dumb question for the Lemmy lawyers, if enough redditors joined could a class action lawsuit be filed to be paid for their content... Or is that so outside of the TOS that it's not worth considering?
I just spent a while today deleting all my posts and comments. At this point they'll probably have plenty of copies of it, but at least the content is not up for them anymore.
Just trying to see if I can survive without an account there (the "forum fediverse", if that makes sense, is getting better and better) and then it'll go to the same place my Twitter and Facebook handles went a while ago.
Yeah, several months ago I used some service to go through and wipe all of my comments and replace them with garbage, and then I deleted my account. Goddamned shame. I was a Reddit user since 2008 or so, though I haven't been active there since the rise of /r/t_d. They really took so much goodwill and popularity and made a point to flush it down the fucking toilet.
Would users licensing their comments and posts help?
It would not. Because when you signed up to Reddit, you accepted their user agreement, which you can read here in full: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2023
As you can see in Section 5: Your Content, you have already consented to following:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit.
Thank you for the response. That really is an all encompassing license reddit has on users' content...
Best thing users could do is leave reddit if they did care.
Of course, you can check the licensing terms of all comments and posts in the EULA: