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If we all feed the machine, how does the machine know what's right, wrong, or scurrilous?
So, social content site Reddit is shopping its wares to AI, signing a $60m/year deal with a “mystery AI firm” for its data to be used to train LLMs.
Perhaps a relevant hint to the mystery: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was a major early investor in Reddit.
But no! Despite the apparent clash of interests… the deal is with Google!
Which, if you know how much Google leans on Reddit for its search results, actually makes sense.
Some users are unsettled, as it's not clear what data or content is actually going to be handed over. After all, some users post extraordinary amounts of very personal information about themselves in what are (perceived to be) member-only parts of the community, including pictures and videos, which would now seemingly be up for grabs.
What responsibility pure AI competitor OpenAI believes it has for such data is outlined on its site, but it’s a bit mealy-mouthed: it says it won’t target you with ads, but, err… it would still have all that stuff about you, ads or not.
We are sure Google has no advertising intentions in mind and organisationally has no way of connecting usernames that match to emails which might be Gmails to get insight into what you post about or follow. (/S).
It says: We use training information only to help our models learn about language and how to understand and respond to it. We do not and will not use any personal information in training information to build profiles about people, to contact them, to advertise to them, to try to sell them anything, or to sell the information itself.
Relevant to publishers: lots of articles are pasted verbatim into Reddit posts rather than linked. So what happens to that data? Lawyers will be working overtime for certain.
Would such a pasted Reddit post be a loophole for an AI to consume any 3rd party data, if it does a deal with Reddit directly? The more popular an article is, or more useful in terms of the information it reveals, the more likely someone will - without malice - paste said content into a thread. It’s being helpful, in fact.
We have already seen that Reddit can outperform Google search results, and in fact - the case of the cake eating itself - posting your own content into Reddit can see your own content outperform your own original article in search results.
And elsewhere, users have already managed to show the danger of AI-generated content based on Reddit threads, by faking thread content to trick an AI-written site into generating fake news. Because, it was funny.
But as we all know not everyone on the internet is funny. Or doing it just for a gag. Basically, who tells the AI what is right or wrong, or truthful or dishonest? If the machine is having everything tipped into its maw, it’s hard to discern good from bad.
If only they had journalists and professionals to help them decide. And this is where the Reddit deal is perhaps more than anything a guide to publishers to the value of their content: professionally created and curated, adhering (by and large) to the laws of the land(s) for things like defamation and slander, and almost by definition deemed worthy of being paid for.
If Reddit is getting $60m/year, what’s your price?
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Read this on our Substack.
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