I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
So I was reading about Reddit’s API controversy from 2023 and fell down a rabbit hole.
Turns out every post, every comment, every opinion you’ve shared here - reddit licensed it to openai and google. No opt-out. No warning. Just. - done.
And that’s just reddit. Meanwhile Google, Meta, and basically every major platform are quietly building a profile on you — your interests, your political leanings, your daily routine, your insecurities. All from things you said or clicked on “anonymously.”
The wild part? We already knew this was happening. It’s not new. Yet here we all are, still posting.
So I’m genuinely curious — why do you still use reddit (or big tech in general) knowing this?
Is it because:
- The alternatives (Lemmy- kbin- etc…) just aren’t there yet?
- You’ve accepted it as the price of the internet
- You actually don’t think it’s that big a deal?
- Or you simply never thought about it until now?
Not judging anyone — I’m still here too. Just want to hear honest answers.
I commented on this post.
I said it doesn’t make sense, anyone can scrap Reddit or Lemmy just fine to train on LLM.
They’re just making it official.
If you don’t want your data trained on LLMs just stop interacting on the internet.
I’m not very into this subject but I think they can use proxies to bypass rate limitation by IPs while scrapping a lot of Reddit per second. Even Lemmy can be scrapped.
Even your views might help LLMs training because your views tell which content is worth to focus and scrap.
We switch to local meeting spots and pass around flashdrives of weekly memes. Refer to your local memester to turn in your flashdrive for a new weekly updated meme drive.
I need to open a meme truck.
That was unironically my take when AI bots started taking over the internet forums.
I even said to a friend, people will start to go back to small closed communities or groups where everybody knows each other, and everybody knows no AI crap will be shared in those groups. Local art will be more valuable because we know for sure that it’s human made and someone put real effort on it.
Mainstream media will be always prone to be AI poisoned.
In many cases, it’s easier to have an online culture with an anti-AI policy than a local one. A bunch of people already insist on using AI when interacting with others irl, and many more are passively supportive of them doing so. (i.e. “they don’t care”, but in a very different way from how “they don’t care” about someone eating vegan).
So an online group that has persistent identities where it’s hard to get a new account with a good status whose culture opposes AI is going to be much easier to keep AI-free than your local neighborhood third space.
Right, like how heavily Lemmy hates AI but then I see AI generated memes or shitposts constantly?
Lemmy doesn’t have an anti-AI policy. It has people that hate AI, and some communities have rules that forbid AI in some contexts, but any instance federated with db0 is at the very least tolerant of AI.
Honestly, I’ll probably go back to that, it felt safer.
It will be like the before times when memes were passed by photocopiers
This is 100% why Reddit made the API changes the originally brought many of us over. AI companies scraped the web, made LLMs, and Reddit missed out. They wanted to make sure the next ones paid them.
Well, until you hit flood limits and reddit keeps giving you ‘prove you’re not a robot’ screens or just timegates you from loading new pages at all.
Plus, it would be a lot more convenient to have API access to automatically provide your AI with only the text of posts and not have to scrape/strip entire pages.
You could scrape reddit without paying for it, but it would probably be a much slower and more annoying process.
You can just control more IP addresses to get around that, which is easy for them.
You can use proxies to bypass rate limits of access, so it wouldn’t be slower just expensive. But the only ones doing it are bigger companies anyway, they’ve money to do it.
Yeah… Compared to the expense of buying literally all the computer hardware in the world, paying reddit for API access is nothing.
Not a problem for fediverse though.