Reddit founder wants to charge Big Tech for scraped data used to train AIs

Online community network Reddit wants to start getting paid by large artificial-intelligence companies that scrape data off its message boards to help train AI products. In an interview with the New York Times, Reddit founder and Chief Executive Steve Huffman said that the “Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” Generative AI has gone mainstream this past year with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — backed by a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft Corp.
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AI uses massive amounts of data drawn from a site’s application program interface, or API, to train the AI product and train for inference. Alphabet Inc.’s
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Google also has a generative-AI product, Bard, and Adobe Inc.
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recently released an AI product named Firefly, a “co-pilot” technology aimed at helping create content. Meta Platforms Inc.
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has its own eponymous product, Meta AI, while Amazon.com Inc.’s
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AWS has released free machine-learning tools for users.