According to a report by the Washington Post on Friday, the aggregating news website Reddit is in discussions with AI giants regarding data payment. If the two parties cannot reach an agreement, Reddit may cut off services for Google and Bing, prohibiting crawlers from search engines such as Google and Bing from obtaining content from the platform.
This will force users to log in to their Reddit account to obtain the information they want. That is to say, Reddit's content will not be displayed in Google and Bing's searches.
In response, the Washington Post's subsequent correction report, as well as The Verge's latest report, pointed out that Reddit denied the claim in the above report that "users must log in to the platform to view content", and as for "blocking search engine crawlers", the official did not deny it. The source also said, "Without searching (the website), Reddit can survive
Reddit is the most frequently visited news website by Americans, where users can create and share content. It is known as the "American version of Baidu Tieba" and currently has over 130000 active communities. According to the company's data at the end of 2020, it has over 1.5 billion registered users, 430 million monthly active users, and 52 million daily active users.
Training AIGC tools requires massive amounts of data, and Reddit has accumulated a large amount of user generated content, all of which are high-quality AI training data, which has enabled this company to find business opportunities.
In April, Reddit announced that it would charge data usage fees to companies using its API to train AI chat robots, including Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and others; In June, its higher than industry average fee standard was exposed - $12000 per 50 million API requests.
If the massive data assets provide Reddit with the possibility of charging, its listing plan highlights the necessity of Reddit charging.
Previously, insiders said that Reddit's goal was to eventually go public later this year - possibly in the second half of the year. Reddit and other companies, including Instaart, are updating their IPO documents to prepare for potential IPOs when market conditions improve.
Multi party pressure on AI giants to end the era of free data?
At present, the AIGC wave is sweeping through companies with data assets, such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), waiting to be sold. It is understood that X's pricing is higher than Reddit. According to previous reports by WIRED, the cheapest package provided by X is: paying $42000 per month to access 50 million tweets.
Companies represented by newspaper publishers choose to build high walls. The Washington Post reported that since August, at least 535 news organizations (including The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post) have installed interceptors to prevent their content from being captured by companies such as OpenAI and used to train products such as ChatGPT.
The purpose is the same - hoping to gain a share in the AIGC market. According to Semafor's July report, the media group IAC, which owns The Daily Beast, is attempting to establish a publisher alliance aimed at winning billions of dollars from AI companies through litigation or legislative action. In August, NPR reported that the New York Times was also considering filing a lawsuit against OpenAI.
In addition to the fee requirements of large companies, large AI companies also face personal pressure, with a large number of authors, artists, and software programmers filing copyright lawsuits, demanding compensation for infringement losses and sharing profits. According to previous reports from Reuters, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has joined the class action lawsuit against Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg as plaintiffs, accusing them of using pirated books to train AI.
Bloomberg stated that by 2032, this market (data fee market) is expected to reach $1.3 trillion.
Of course, behind the fees, it's not just a matter of money. Many companies view data usage as a survival issue and worry that AI will learn from their own data and instead poach their own users. Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, a question and answer platform for programmers, stated that one month after OpenAI launched GPT-4, as programmers turned to AI to seek answers to coding questions, the traffic in the coding community Stack Overflow decreased by 15%. He believes that artificial intelligence has been trained in Stack Overflow data.
The latest news shows that Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of employees.
At present, whether it is media groups or mainstream social platforms, they are still in a tug of war with AI giants. Whether or not they need to pay, how to charge, and companies with different discourse rights will receive different results.