Reddit Negotiates Content Licensing Deal for ai Training
As a potential initial public offering (IPO) debut looms in March, Reddit has reportedly signed a $60 million content licensing agreement with an undisclosed major ai company. This move aims to showcase potential revenue streams in the rapidly growing ai industry to prospective investors.
Significance of Reddit’s Decision
If confirmed, this deal could have significant implications. Reddit’s vast trove of user-generated content – including posts from popular subreddits, comments from prominent and obscure users, and discussions on a wide range of topics – could be used to train and enhance existing large language models (LLMs) or provide the foundation for new generative ai systems.
User Reactions
However, Reddit’s decision may not be well-received by its user base. The company has faced increasing opposition from its community regarding recent business decisions.
Controversial Decisions
- Starting to charge for access to Reddit’s application programming interfaces (APIs) last year led to thousands of temporary forum shutdowns.
- Reddit faced a ransom demand from hackers who released previously stolen site data unless the company reversed its API plan or paid $4.5 million.
- The platform removed years of private chat logs and messages from users’ accounts, as well as new automatic moderation features and the option to turn off personalized advertising.
Ethical Debate
The reported deal to sell Reddit’s data for ai training could lead to even more backlash from users as the ethical debate over using public data, art, and other human-created content to train ai systems intensifies across various industries and platforms.
