Washington Post technology/2023/10/20/artificial-intelligence-battle-online-data/”>reported on friday that Reddit could isolate Google and force users to log into Reddit to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative ai companies to pay for their data. But the company says The edge that is not true. “Nothing is changing,” says Reddit spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr.
The Washington Post The report wasn’t just focused on Reddit: it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have chosen to block their content from being removed by companies like OpenAI to help power products like ChatGPT. According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with artificial intelligence companies to pay for using its data, and if it can’t reach those agreements, it could require logging in to view content. That could have the side effect of preventing Reddit results from appearing in Google searches.
“Reddit can survive without search,” said the MailAnonymous source.
We got a glimpse of what Google would look like without Reddit when many subreddits went dark to protest the company’s API pricing changes; At the time, many Reddit results took you to private communities, which was a pain. Adding “site:reddit.com” to a Google search has become a popular trick to remove SEO farms and other attention-seeking websites from Google results, and a forced login would disrupt that.
While Reddit’s protests were largely about how API pricing changes would force some third-party app developers to shut down their apps, Reddit’s original announcement about the pricing changes positioned them as a way to getting ai companies to pay to vacuum Reddit data to train large language models. It wasn’t until later that the impact on app developers became evident. (In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in conversations” with ai companies about price changes. When I asked for more details, he didn’t elaborate.)
