Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Reddit has entered a contract with Google, which will license its content for $60 million a year in order to train Google’s AI models.
Google gave up their “do no evil” philosophy a long time ago, unfortunately.
Around the time they re-corporatized into Alphabet. Probably a little while before that, so at least a solid decade since that’s been completely out the window.
Also, it only ever referred to putting ads before search results… which is how it is now. They clearly dropped any principles they had a long time ago. It’s honestly a little shocking more isn’t written about how Google was one of the earliest to begin its enshittification process, probably with the death of Google Reader, which was the death knell for RSS feeds and the Old Internet.
They restructured as Alphabet in 2015, and Reader was shut down in 2013. Google was founded in 1998. So that means it took about 15 years all told for Google to completely shed any ethics or morals they had about being a better company. That’s how quickly selling out your principles happens now.
Speaking of which, let’s bring back Selling Out.