[worf]

https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/reddit-u ... eing-sold/

Reddit user content being sold to AI company in $60M/year deal

It’s being reported that a deal has been struck to allow an unnamed large AI company to use Reddit user content for training purposes …

The deal is said to be worth around $60M per year, and comes at a time when the company is seeking to maximize its value in the run-up to an IPO.

Bloomberg reports.

Reddit has signed a contract allowing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company to train its models on the social media platform’s content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The company is said to have disclosed the deal to prospective investors in its initial public offering (IPO).

AI companies like OpenAI have so far been training their large language models by scraping data from the web without seeking permission from either websites or users. That practice is being increasingly questioned, so we’re now starting to see companies seek to enter into deals with websites, paying an annual fee for the right to use their content to train new models.

Apple, for example, was last year reported to be negotiating for the right to train its own AI models using news articles with a number of media companies.

The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, said the people with knowledge of talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens.

But training models on user-generated content is more controversial. Reddit’s terms and conditions may make this legal, but it doesn’t mean that users will be happy about it

It follows Reddit’s most controversial move to date: restricting access to the API which powered popular client apps like Apollo. That too was motivated by maximizing revenue prior to the planned IPO, and sparked extremely widespread protests.

Reddit got itself into a mess when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, with the company threatening them in response.

One specific concern was the impact on disabled moderators, who had relied on the accessibility features of third-party apps.

While many subreddits went dark, limiting access to existing members, some others came up with a clever alternative: applying a NFSW label, which prevented Reddit from selling ads in them. Subreddits that adopted this tactic include r/HomeKit and r/HomePod.

Reddit staff subsequently removed moderators who declined to end their protests.

[XR4Tim]

With AI learning from Reddit, it's going to become an indisputable fact that the only two cars worth owning are a Camry and a Miata. I guess that's better than AI learning from NBC News.

[fpena944]

https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/reddit-u ... eing-sold/

Reddit user content being sold to AI company in $60M/year deal

It’s being reported that a deal has been struck to allow an unnamed large AI company to use Reddit user content for training purposes …

The deal is said to be worth around $60M per year, and comes at a time when the company is seeking to maximize its value in the run-up to an IPO.

Bloomberg reports.

Reddit has signed a contract allowing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company to train its models on the social media platform’s content, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The company is said to have disclosed the deal to prospective investors in its initial public offering (IPO).

AI companies like OpenAI have so far been training their large language models by scraping data from the web without seeking permission from either websites or users. That practice is being increasingly questioned, so we’re now starting to see companies seek to enter into deals with websites, paying an annual fee for the right to use their content to train new models.

Apple, for example, was last year reported to be negotiating for the right to train its own AI models using news articles with a number of media companies.

The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, said the people with knowledge of talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens.

But training models on user-generated content is more controversial. Reddit’s terms and conditions may make this legal, but it doesn’t mean that users will be happy about it

It follows Reddit’s most controversial move to date: restricting access to the API which powered popular client apps like Apollo. That too was motivated by maximizing revenue prior to the planned IPO, and sparked extremely widespread protests.

Reddit got itself into a mess when it decided to charge unrealistic amounts for access to the API that powered third-party (former) apps like Apollo. That resulted in wide-scale protests by moderators and users alike, with the company threatening them in response.

One specific concern was the impact on disabled moderators, who had relied on the accessibility features of third-party apps.

While many subreddits went dark, limiting access to existing members, some others came up with a clever alternative: applying a NFSW label, which prevented Reddit from selling ads in them. Subreddits that adopted this tactic include r/HomeKit and r/HomePod.

Reddit staff subsequently removed moderators who declined to end their protests.

Isn't it something that user-generated content can be packaged and sold to another company without any compensation to the original author?!?

[maddog2020]

in the user agreement for TOS the owner of the forum becomes the owner of the content as soon as it is posted.

[Zirconocene]

That Reddit sitch was real BS and has kept me away from the site since, though I'm starting to cave and backslide. Much like TOS, there's some good discussion over there on car related topics. Of course, the ultimate goal would be to build that same kind of thing here, and it's genuinely great that knowledgeable, experienced folks are here to interact with.

I don't have a solution, but agree with the spirit of this post and am doing what I can to vote with my keyboard and eyeballs.

Cheers

[worf]

in the user agreement for TOS the owner of the forum becomes the owner of the content as soon as it is posted.

Absolutely. And *that* is why I ‘moved.’ The OP’d news article is just the inevitable icing on the rotten cake.

[maddog2020]

and that is why I deleted as much as I could and also edited a great deal of it

[SeanR]

Exactly the reason I stopped posting and took down as much of my posts as I could before it was stopped. If I wasn't able to edit posts were I found out later I was incorrect on something. It was then I realized it wasn't my information, it was IB's.

This happened shortly after one of our current members took the site down as he was deleting his stuff too.

[h2pmr]

i must be missing something, but as a pure example:
if you post a detailed write up on a forum of a how to fit a headlight washer motor to a 928, it helps the person who asked the question and anybody else that reads your post on the forum.

its just a 928 related post and you posted it for free, how does it make any difference who owns it or what anybody does with that information ?

[fpena944]

i must be missing something, but as a pure example:
if you post a detailed write up on a forum of a how to fit a headlight washer motor to a 928, it helps the person who asked the question and anybody else that reads your post on the forum.

its just a 928 related post and you posted it for free, how does it make any difference who owns it or what anybody does with that information ?

I think the issue is that the content becomes owned by the entity it sits on. So now they're able to take your work and package or sell it for their own benefit without compensating the original creator.

Here the content created by individual contributors is owned by them. So if you want it gone, I can easily delete it. If there comes a point where there is an opportunity to generate revenue, we'd go with a shared revenue model. Plus I don't mind any contributors posting links back to their own businesses if they are adding value to the forum.

[SeanR]

i must be missing something, but as a pure example:
if you post a detailed write up on a forum of a how to fit a headlight washer motor to a 928, it helps the person who asked the question and anybody else that reads your post on the forum.

its just a 928 related post and you posted it for free, how does it make any difference who owns it or what anybody does with that information ?

My biggest issue was the removal of the edit feature. If I gave poor advice to the 928 community, not knowing how awful it was at the time, and I came back to correct the issue and couldn't. That poor advice was there forever making me look bad for giving it.

Pictures and procedures that I posted were no longer my intellectual property, I was giving it away free to a corporate entity who could use/sell it without my permission. Since I run a 928 repair business it was decided that if someone wanted that information from me, they could contact me instead. Selfish I know, but that's just the way it is.

[hernanca]

The bad vibe I get from all this is that it just smacks too much of:

A. Me sharing knowledge with some like minded friends and some spy listens in and copies it all to fill his/her selfish coffers with little effort on their part.

B. A spy gathering information for an enemy.

C. Abusive profiting off the blood, sweat, and tears of others.

D. Cheap but authentic looking copy cat products.

E. Snitches.

F. Posers.

The unfortunate reality seems that the masses will eat it up like a Walmart sale.

Perhaps we need to create our own AI? I have come up with this idea more than once, lately! AI is what got me into Computer Science! I was a Psychology major. I studied and worked with the rudimentary early stuff (Expert Systems, Fuzzy Logic, Natural Language Processing). Neural networks were a thing back then, too, but not as refined and productized as it is today and without the computing power we have today. These deep learning neural network systems fascinate me but is also a bit frustrating since I am near retirement age now!

There are already automotive diagnostic systems out there. Back when I was doing the expert systems work, one of my colleagues had written a very good automotive diagnostic expert system as his college project. The hard part for building those rule based expert systems was in extracting the rules/logic used by the experts. When you get really good at something, what you do tends to be very automatic and therefore difficult to verbalize all the logic involved behind a course of action. I want to understand how neural networks are different from this. They call it "deep learning" but in my eyes that just refers to the depth to which the rules are buried as statistical models within the simulated neural network. To use commonly found examples to come up with "rules" that are then used to model the world, is not what I would consider true "deep learning". Now, if such a system was also fed automotive repair tomes which allows it to decipher the wheat from the chaff, then there is hope.

Sorry for the digression - the topic obviously interests me! We need to build our own AI's!!! Oooh, how about we each build personal AI's and then give them a private forum to debate on and refine each other?! LOL, but perhaps something there too! Hmmm!

[worf]

My biggest issue was the removal of the edit feature. If I gave poor advice to the 928 community, not knowing how awful it was at the time, and I came back to correct the issue and couldn't. That poor advice was there forever making me look bad for giving it.

Pictures and procedures that I posted were no longer my intellectual property, I was giving it away free to a corporate entity who could use/sell it without my permission. Since I run a 928 repair business it was decided that if someone wanted that information from me, they could contact me instead. Selfish I know, but that's just the way it is.

This -^. Precisely.

[h2pmr]

i must be missing something, but as a pure example:
if you post a detailed write up on a forum of a how to fit a headlight washer motor to a 928, it helps the person who asked the question and anybody else that reads your post on the forum.

its just a 928 related post and you posted it for free, how does it make any difference who owns it or what anybody does with that information ?

My biggest issue was the removal of the edit feature. If I gave poor advice to the 928 community, not knowing how awful it was at the time, and I came back to correct the issue and couldn't. That poor advice was there forever making me look bad for giving it.

Pictures and procedures that I posted were no longer my intellectual property, I was giving it away free to a corporate entity who could use/sell it without my permission. Since I run a 928 repair business it was decided that if someone wanted that information from me, they could contact me instead. Selfish I know, but that's just the way it is.

Ah i did not know you could not edit a post on RL and giving free advice gained from years of experience which could then be widely used and easily affect your business is not good.

this www. thing is both a blessing and a curse, i will stick to tinkering with 928's as it was built in far simpler times, ideal for a simple guy like me

and thanks for clarifying the position on this excellent forum Mr moderator

cheers
Phil

[XR4Tim]

With AI learning from Reddit, it's going to become an indisputable fact that the only two cars worth owning are a Camry and a Miata. I guess that's better than AI learning from NBC News.

[worf]

With AI learning from Reddit, it's going to become an indisputable fact that the only two cars worth owning are a Camry and a Miata. I guess that's better than AI learning from NBC News.

Given the average crap-to-worthwhile advice ratio on forums, if Camry and Miata owners use the advice of an Auto Repair AI trained on internet automotive forums, the best case is that their cars will be held together with mechanics wire, duct tape, jb-weld, and Oeticer Clamps. Worst case: they won’t run or will catch on fire.

The ‘thing’ about AI is: the training data. Garbage in, AI garbage out.

[Crumpler]

+1
I was thinking the data dump from RL would be a box of squirrels.
Resulting in a megalomaniac GB chatbot.

[worf]

To be precise…

I have no indication that IB is planing to license their data for AI training. Reddit isn’t Rennlist.

But, IB is run by sleazy whores. If there’s a hole, they’ll sell it. If they see someone else selling a new hole they’ll put some lube on their equivalent hole.

(I think I killed that metaphor, thoroughly.)