Technology

59569 readers

3825 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

611

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

submitted 9 months ago by DolphinMath@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

104 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] themurphy@lemmy.world 10 points 9 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?

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 15 points 9 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.

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] lemmyingly@lemm.ee 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 9 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

[–] themurphy@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 months ago

Nobody does

[–] markon@lemmy.world 2 points 9 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.

[–] learningduck@programming.dev 1 points 9 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.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Reddit has a ton more content though.

Lemmy just has a lot of vintage memes

[–] themurphy@lemmy.world 1 points 9 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.