Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.
  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    131·
    9 months ago

    Great. Now all the AI bots will just be saying “This” and “came here to say that.”

  • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
    922·
    9 months ago

    Well… We all knew that was coming. If you still have an account haven’t done so, now’s a good time to purge your account!

    • bamboo@lemm.ee
      37·
      9 months ago

      Unless you live in the EU or California, odds are that just deletes the public data, I’m sure Reddit retains it and would sell it.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
      18·
      9 months ago

      Reddit account data has been training AI for over a decade. If you ever used it, you’re already in a training set

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
      131·
      9 months ago

      Better yet, use an overwrite script to help turn their training models to jelly

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      9 months ago

      That will remove your account from public view, but will it remove it from the data they use for AI training?

      If not, you’re just enhancing the value of their proprietary data.

      • i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        Why wouldn’t they enhance it themselves, like Twitter has been doing for months? Once they make signing in mandatory and implement per-user rate limits the information will disappear from the internet and will only be available to people who are paying in some way.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 months ago

      I’d be very surprised if comments weren’t versioned in some way, so even if you delete or rewrite that data, it’s probably still there and a part of training data.

      • athos77@kbin.social
        3·
        9 months ago

        They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.

        It’s possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn’t foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn’t foresee changes to API pricing, he didn’t foresee the protests, how long they’d last, or how many people just walked away.

        Hell, in the previous big “closed subs” protest they’d never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn’t break reddit.

        I just don’t see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn’t have it anymore. Of course, it’s still out there, in Google’s cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it’s no longer indeed reddit’s control, and they won’t be able to profit from it.

    • Hubi@feddit.de
      4·
      9 months ago

      That’s what I just did with my account of 10 years. I had all comments overwritten with gibberish and purged them a few days later. I’ll send them a final DSGVO request and delete it afterwards.

    • SkippingRelax@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      Done it a few months ago but then again if I was working at reddit and in charge of preparing the dataset to feed to the llm, I’d give it access to both a recent one and a snapshot from before July 2023 (or whenever shit hit the fan and we all came to lemmy), most edits would have been made in protest. And AI can figure out which ones by itself

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        9 months ago

        Even if it’s just another scheme to further concentrate wealth (and it is at least that), that harms everyone but the 0.1%.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          427·
          9 months ago

          I draw plenty of benefit from AI tools. There are open source models that anyone can run.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
              215·
              9 months ago

              My original question remains unanswered. “It may help someone I don’t like because they are richer than me” is a pretty weak concept of “harm.”

              • ImpossibilityBox@lemmy.world
                8·
                9 months ago

                That argument is a very short (not very detailed) way of surmising the current issue with our world as a whole.

                Don’t like how cars have taken over the world, are the reason cities are hard to live in for low income families, and cause massive amount of climate damage? You can thank the 1% for that.

                Frustrated with how you don’t really own anything, your digital “property” can be taken away from you at a moments notice, and that everything you enjoy gets stuffed with schemes to make more money off of vulnerable people? You can thank the 1% for that.

                Angered that health care costs truly absurd amounts, that medicine is sold to the consumer with a 10,000% mark up, or that a single accident that was not their fault could land someone in debt for life? You can thank the 1% for that.

                A disturbing amount of things that are not good for our planet, keep the poor people poor, and generate inferior products/experiences is directly because of the insane power that the rich hold over our worlds systems.

                “It helps someone I don’t like because they are richer than me” is actually a wonderful definition of harm.

                Reddit used to be an amazing place of community and content that you couldn’t find anywhere on the internet. Then in the pursuit of money and the power that the 1% have Reddit (the company) started implementing practices that actively made the experience worse for the user, violated a person’s ownership of their content, and removed choice just like authoritative/dictatorship governments do.

                It feels to most people that there is nearly nothing that can be done about it. So when a person has the opportunity to directly go against the rich caste in our world they will take that opportunity immediately.

                I recommend taking a hard look at the things that concern you with our world, or cause you pain/annoyance/discomfort and try and learn WHY the issue is the way it is. The majority of the time is because some rich person/group of people (I’m looking at you lobby groups) has an obscene amount of power compared to all of the people affected.

                Lastly there is a reason that “Tax the rich/Eat the rich” is the rally cry of generations.

                It’s because the rich cause us harm.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
              12·
              9 months ago

              I was directly addressing all of the points you raised.

              You said it concentrates wealth, but open source does the opposite of that - it allows small companies and individuals to earn money using the technology without having to pay for its use.

              You said it “harms everyone but the 0.1%.” I am benefited by it, not harmed, and I am very much not part of the 0.1%.

              • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                9 months ago

                You’re hallucinating. (Pun intended.)

                Neither Capt. Wolf nor I said a single thing about AI or Open Source. And the article didn’t mention anything about Open Source.

                • FaceDeer@kbin.social
                  13·
                  9 months ago

                  No, I said things about AI and open source. I raised open source as part of my counter to your argument that this is “concentrating wealth.”

                  Here, I’ll explain in detail what’s going on.

                  In response to an article about Reddit licensing your content to AI trainers, capt_wolf said “it’s time to purge your account.” Presumably as a way to stop that from happening. I asked why that was a bad thing, specifically how it harmed us in any meaningful way. You came in at that point and suggested:

                  • It’s a scheme to further concentrate wealth
                  • It harms everyone but the 0.1%.

                  I raised open source as a counter to the “wealth concentration” point, because open source does the opposite - it spreads the wealth to any who want it. It puts these resources into the commons.

                  I also pointed out that I personally benefit from AI tools, so it does the opposite of harming me. As I am not part of the 0.1%, that’s a counter to your second point.

  • tristan@aussie.zone
    333·
    9 months ago

    You know how artists can poison their images for AI… We need a way to poison content on Reddit

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
    29·
    9 months ago

    FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

    I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

    Their post history was discoverable by using " site:reddit.com" on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

    So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

    • Corkyskog
      6·
      9 months ago

      What happens if you edit every other post with absolute nonsense sentences? I doubt they have a way to go through that?

    • mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk
      1·
      9 months ago

      This is how I cleaned (most) of my old posts: Searched them via Google. As they’re posted under my username I was able to change them into nonsense before deleting then. Even though they never appeared under my profile anymore.

    • RoosterBoy@lemm.ee
      1·
      9 months ago

      No, that’s Google keeping the content of the pages they scraped at the time they scraped them.

  • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
    231·
    9 months ago

    Alt title: Reddit looking to steal value from their millions of free users

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
    15·
    9 months ago

    This is why I deleted my posts. Also, 60 million is a jokingly lowball figure.

    I wonder how reddit users feel about this. I wouldn’t know, I DNS blocked the site months ago.

  • trolololol@lemmy.world
    14·
    9 months ago

    This is going to produce the saltiest AI the world has ever seen.

    “Hey reddit ai , give me an idea how to balance my budget and pay my student debt, mate”. “here ya go, I got a noose for you. Also I’m not your mate, dude”.

    " Hey reddit ai, draw for me a house with a genz family". Here ya go. " Hey reddit ai, why did you show me a pic of a highway ramp with homeless people?"

  • Flumpkin@slrpnk.net
    12·
    9 months ago

    It’s a power grab. They’ll justify control over the training data with intellectual property which keeps it out of the hands of everyday people but they stole the “intellectual property” from us in the first place. Then they’ll control the “means of generation”.

      • athos77@kbin.social
        8·
        9 months ago

        Spez has spent his entire time as CEO chasing the latest tech shiny - reddit crypto, reddit NFTs, reddit video a la TikTok. And he’s always managed to do it after the craze has started to peak. So now he’s chasing the latest shiny, reddit AI, starting a full year after everyone else already released their products.

        He’s late yet again, and he’s proven repeatedly that’s he’s failed to understand reddit’s greatest strengths and value. This “reddit AI content” and the IPO is his last chance to get some value out of reddit, and his last chance to make money for nothing because no one is going to hire him in a leadership role ever again. I just wonder if he’s smart enough to understand that, or whether he’s just hoping to get enough money to fully build out and stock his personal doomsday bunker.

      • Corkyskog
        3·
        9 months ago

        Pretend your Spez. You know that, but will your investors? Investors now a days just toss money at anything with the word AI.

      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
        2·
        9 months ago

        To have better bots so they can advertise via posts and make it seem like a human recommended it. That’s why a lot of people started using Reddit in the first place. Myself included. Only time I use it now it’s when a search result takes me there. Can’t remember the last time it was a useful result though.

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
    134·
    9 months ago

    Just think, in 1000 years your body will be long dead but you’ll be forced to live on as a poster! Death is not an option. 😌

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
    7·
    9 months ago

    I stopped posting there the moment they pulled the trigger on the API change. I used to like cruising LinuxQuestions and answering people, too.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
      2·
      9 months ago

      Yup, I provided a bit of good content, but I left as soon as the API change was announced.