Reddit Has Reportedly Signed Over Its Content to Train AI Models

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:Reddit has signed a contract allowing an AI company to train its models on the social media platform's content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter... The agreement, signed with an "unnamed large AI company", could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, Bloomberg reported. Mashable writes that the move "means that Reddit posts, from the most popular subreddits to the comments of lurkers and small accounts, could build up already-existing LLMs or provide a framework for the next generative AI play."It's a dicey decision from Reddit, as users are already at odds with the business decisions of the nearly 20-year-old platform. Last year, following Reddit's announcement that it would begin charging for access to its APIs, thousands of Reddit forums shut down in protest... This new AI deal could generate even more user ire, as debate rages on about the ethics of using public data, art, and other human-created content to train AI. Some context from the Verge:The deal, "worth about $60 million on an annualized basis," Bloomberg writes, could still change as the company's plans to go public are still in the works. Until recently, most AI companies trained their data on the open web without seeking permission. But that's proven to be legally questionable, leading companies to try to get data on firmer footing. It's not known what company Reddit made the deal with, but it's quite a bit more than the $5 million annual deal OpenAI has reportedly been offering news publishers for their data. Apple has also been seeking multi-year deals with major news companies that could be worth "at least $50 million," according to The New York Times. The news also follows an October story that Reddit had threatened to cut off Google and Bing's search crawlers if it couldn't make a training data deal with AI companies.

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