It’s being reported that a deal has been struck to allow an unnamed large AI company to use Reddit user content for training purposes …
The deal is said to be worth around $60M per year, and comes at a time when the company is seeking to maximize its value in the run-up to an IPO.
Bloomberg reports.
Reddit has signed a contract allowing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company to train its models on the social media platform’s content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company is said to have disclosed the deal to prospective investors in its initial public offering (IPO).
AI companies like OpenAI have so far been training their large language models by scraping data from the web without seeking permission from either websites or users. That practice is being increasingly questioned, so we’re now starting to see companies seek to enter into deals with websites, paying an annual fee for the right to use their content to train new models.
Apple, for example, was last year reported to be negotiating for the right to train its own AI models using news articles with a number of media companies.
The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, said the people with knowledge of talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens.
But training models on user-generated content is more controversial. Reddit’s terms and conditions may make this legal, but it doesn’t mean that users will be happy about it
It follows Reddit’s most controversial move to date: restricting access to the API which powered popular client apps like Apollo. That too was motivated by maximizing revenue prior to the planned IPO, and sparked extremely widespread protests.
Reddit got itself into a mess when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, with the company threatening them in response.
One specific concern was the impact on disabled moderators, who had relied on the accessibility features of third-party apps.
While many subreddits went dark, limiting access to existing members, some others came up with a clever alternative: applying a NFSW label, which prevented Reddit from selling ads in them. Subreddits that adopted this tactic include r/HomeKit and r/HomePod.
Reddit staff subsequently removed moderators who declined to end their protests.
Photo by Brett Jordan/Pexels
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