The magic of Reddit is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for browsing the platform are closing up shop ahead of a new initiative from Reddit to charge for access to its API.
Even if the decision is ultimately rolled back, it’s a moment that has shifted the culture of Reddit forever.
When the company announced the API change in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times one of the main reasons for the move was that it would compel companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay up. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated would cost some $20 million annually.
To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results.
https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-api-changes-ai-labor/
Lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of personal data' to train ChatGPT
https://www.businessinsider.com/ope...personal-data-lawsuit-children-medical-2023-6
Even if the decision is ultimately rolled back, it’s a moment that has shifted the culture of Reddit forever.
When the company announced the API change in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times one of the main reasons for the move was that it would compel companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay up. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated would cost some $20 million annually.
To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results.
https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-api-changes-ai-labor/
Lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of personal data' to train ChatGPT
https://www.businessinsider.com/ope...personal-data-lawsuit-children-medical-2023-6