I do. It's frankly selfish. Having an AI get training on my old comments costs me nothing and it results in the development of useful AI tools. Trying to sabotage that is petty and pointless. It's not like you could somehow collect the fraction of a pittance that you think you're owed retroactively. I never commented on Reddit thinking "awesome, I'm going to make bank on the content I'm generating here."
People complain about the capitalist mindset of the world and then they do this. Sigh.
I had an 11 year old account that I deleted all my old comments and posts from because of the API debacle. Does that make me selfish that I felt like Reddit wasn’t holding up its end of the unwritten agreement?
Reddit doesn’t deserve my content anymore than I deserve access from the third party API.
If you did it over the API debacle then you're not one of the people I'm talking about here. This is about people deleting their content to prevent it from being used to train AIs.
Do you not remember the real reason why the API debacle happened in the first place was to prepare for this moment? It was always about easy access to training data, third party apps got caught in the crossfire.
That's ignoring an awful lot of other considerations. Obviously Reddit hasn't explained itself in a trustworthy way, but a common belief at the time is that it was to force people to use the official Reddit mobile app so they could be subject to advertising.
It's the insistence that everything that people do must be compensated with money. People have spent years posting on Reddit for fun, without any thought to being paid for it, and now all of a sudden someone else is making some money so they're demanding that they should get their slice. And doing what they can to wreck their earlier efforts when they don't.
How does Reddit making some money licensing this stuff harm those of us who contributed to it? Is there any problem aside from "I wanna get paid!"?
Why do you think it's about wanting a slice? They posted on Reddit with no expectation of profit. But they don't want others to profit off it either. It's not that complicated.
They wouldn't have posted if they knew this was going to happen. They posted because it was fun, not for this.
They may be morally opposed to AI (as there are many valid reasons to be opposed to it), or they may just have wanted to have been able to make an informed decision before posting, but by retroactively training the AI on their posts they've robbed them of the agency to make that decision.
They posted content on a website whose user agreement says "we can do whatever we like with the content you post here" and then go surprised-pikachu when the website goes ahead and does whatever they like with the content they posted. Frankly, I'm not tremendously sympathetic. This should have been easy to predict.
Oh yeah I'm sure you predicted LLMs, and that they would need ridiculous amounts of training data wayyyy back in 2005 when Reddit started lol. Super easy to predict. Good job bud.
What about people who just think “A.I.” Is dog shit and chat bots are a dumb obsession steering the industry in the wrong direction due to hype and money?