this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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If Reddit just charged the AI people for API access and left 3rd party apps alone I doubt anyone would have given a shit, but they had to go and two-birds-with-one-stone it. Then they insisted on digging their hole deeper by running their mouths and making the situation worse.
I suspect they have signed an exclusivity deal with some kind of third party to use the API. It could be for "AI" or it could be for more nefarious purposes.
Spez knows he can create 'traffic' of user comments and answers with AI. He also knows he can use AI to moderate subreddits. He doesn't care about the quality of the site, just the numbers that get him his payday. He'll burn it to the ground and cash-out, leaving a mess in his wake.
That's why it's important to go back thru our comment history and replace them with linguistic garbage. To ensure Reddit can't profit off our donations. I'm not in the business of subsidizing Reddit, after all.
"Plonked up behind the radio them ready the plastic manuscript who observe Jerry's can." Or whatever.
If I were implementing this nefarious Reddit I probably wouldn't have edits wipe out the original Tatars data. It's certainly not necessary to implement edits that way.
In fact, the editing log itself can be used as more data.
We actually know for a fact they don't do it that way, since Reddit has already been caught undoing peoples "delete" edits after they've gone
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat on the reddit board for years and was briefly CEO for 8 days.
OpenAI is another dumpster fire waiting to happen, then.
Why else would they make access to OpenAI/ChatGPT/etc so cheap? So others can build businesses on the tech that get locked in before they jack up the price.
We've seen this rodeo plenty of times now.
I don't disagree with your saying that is why they're doing it - but I wonder how well it will actually work out for them. Natural Language Prompting is hard to "lock in" someone on. Sure, the complex jobs with custom trained models are going to get locked in for sure - but the companies that are just adding "chat bots" to their apps? I don't see the difficulty in migration.
I use OpenAI for one of my projects, and frankly there's little that would keep me from being able to migrate to another service if one came along that gave a better value. An AI platform isn't like an IaaS platform, there really isn't a lot of platform-specific workflows involved, and prompts that work on one LLM should work just about as well on another.
Even for custom trained models, most training data is stored in json, and should be easy to feed into another LLM, though of course tweaking will be required
They would have gone straight to scraping if they couldn't reach a deal. Sam Altman is on the board of reddit. He knows which way the wind blows there.
LLMs are already relying on web scraping and always have. They are getting data from the entire Internet, do people really think OpenAI is doing individual integrations with every single website throughout the Internet?! Are Google and Bing doing that, too?
It's complete FUD.
This is such a great point that I hadn't even considered. These API changes will have exactly zero effect on LLM's and similar services.
There may be some complexity with legality here though. Obviously Google and other search engines already have most of Reddit's content indexed, but there are some legal arguments as to whether they can use the content to create derivative works.
If Reddit opens up its API and specifically allows AI companies to use the content to create LLMs and other AI tools then from a legal point of view they may find this much more preferable to facing potential legal action further down the road.
The ai people aren’t using api
Since spez said that one objection was that other people were making money where reddit wasn't, one thing I'd have been okay with is if the API worked only for those who were reddit premium. (To be open, I was already paying for the lowest tier of premium.)
Although this is a reasonable solution, it's also reasonable to just let the apps charge a subscription and pay the API fees, which is what the app devs planned. The only issue is that Reddit set their API fees so high that the app devs can't possibly charge enough to make it profitable, certainly not in the time frame they were given.