According to a Bloomberg story, Reddit has struck a content licensing agreement to permit the use of its data for AI model training.
Reddit has apparently inked a $60 million contract with an unidentified prominent AI business, just in before of a possible $5 billion initial public offering (IPO) launch in March. This action can be interpreted as a last-ditch attempt to show prospective investors possible revenue streams in the quickly expanding AI sector.
Reddit has not yet verified the agreement, but the choice might have a big impact. If this is accurate, Reddit’s enormous repository of user-generated content—which includes discussions on a variety of subjects, posts from well-known subreddits, and comments from both well-known and obscure users—may be used to train and improve already-existing large language models (LLMs) or serve as the basis for the creation of brand-new generative AI systems.
Reddit’s user base may not agree with this move, though, as the community has been increasingly critical of the company’s recent financial choices.
Thousands of Reddit forums momentarily closed in protest after Reddit revealed plans to begin charging for access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) last year. A few days later, if the company didn’t reverse the API proposal or didn’t pay a $4.5 million ransom, a group of Reddit hackers threatened to reveal previously obtained site data.
Other contentious decisions have lately been taken by Reddit, like deleting years’ worth of private chat logs and messages from user accounts. To add to the dissatisfaction of its users, the site also removed the opportunity for users to turn off tailored advertising and introduced new automatic moderation tools.
The controversy surrounding the use of public data, artwork, and other human-generated content to train AI systems is becoming more and more prevalent across a range of platforms and businesses, and it may grow in response to the most recent reported agreement to sell Reddit’s user data for AI training.