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Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Reddit has entered a contract with Google, which will license its content for $60 million a year in order to train Google’s AI models.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Question: Wouldn't Lemmy instances easy be able to this without many users knowing?

And would they also be able to sell data from other instances, because they can load data from federated instances?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Basically yes, but unlike Reddit which has control over its proprietary network, Lemmy instances would have a hard time locking down access to create artificial scarcity for their data without causing other problems.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Technically? Probably, yes. Legally? I don't think so (never looked into it)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Why do you believe they wouldn't legally be able to?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It's the whole copyright question. Users own the copyright on their own posts, and it's the terms of service that are supposed to say what the server and other federated servers are allowed or not allowed to do with them. I don't even remember if there were terms of service when I joined Lemmy... But assuming there were, and they didn't explicitly say whether it or federated servers can use user content to train AI, then it becomes a legal question that can only be determined by courts.

Note that this determination will only apply in the country/state where that court is.

IANAL

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And why would anyone believe they'd stop if it wasn't legal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Nobody does

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I don't have a problem with anyone scraping what's already public, I just don't want anyone to profit off just selling the data I made for them. OpenAI is at least creating useful stuff. All Reddit ever did was be the middleman.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Reddit has a ton more content though.

Lemmy just has a lot of vintage memes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Agreed.

But it's just a little hypocritical to not use reddit because of this, if it turns out it's much worse to use Lemmy in this regard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah. Guess some AI companies may have set up an instance already. They won't even have a rate limit or anything on their own instances.