Subj : Are you a Reddit user? Google's about to feed all your posts to a To : All From : TechnologyDaily Date : Fri Feb 23 2024 12:00:06 Are you a Reddit user? Google's about to feed all your posts to a hungry AI, and theres nothing you can do about it Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:55:33 +0000 Description: Reddit is about to get an injection of AI courtesy of Google - heres everything you need to know. FULL STORY ====================================================================== Google and Reddit have announced a huge content licensing deal, reportedly worth a whopping $60 million - but Reddit users are pissed . Why, you might ask? Well, the deal involves Google using content posted by users on Reddit to train its AI models, chiefly its newly launched Google Gemini AI suite. It makes sense; Reddit contains a wealth of information and users typically talk colloquially, which Google is probably hoping will make for a more intelligent and more conversational AI service. However, this also essentially means that anything you post on Reddit now becomes fuel for the AI engine, something many users are taking umbrage at. While the very first thing that came to mind was MITs insane Reddit-trained psychopath AI from years ago, its fair to say that AI model training has come a long way since then - so hooking it up to Reddit hopefully wont turn Gemini into a raving lunatic. The deal, announced yesterday by Reddit in a blog post , will have other benefits as well: since many people specifically append reddit to their search queries when looking for the answer to a question, Google aims to make getting to the relevant content on Reddit easier. Reddit plans to use Googles Vertex AI to improve its own internal site search functionality, too, so Reddit users will enjoy a boost to the user experience - rather than getting absolutely nothing in return for their training data. Do Redditors deserve a cut of that $60 million? A lot of Reddit users have been complaining about the deal in various threads on the site , for a wide variety of reasons. Some users have privacy worries, some voiced concerns about the quality of output from an AI trained on Reddit content (which, lets be honest, can get pretty toxic), and others simply dont want their posts stolen to train an AI. Unfortunately for any unhappy Redditors, the sites Terms of Service do mean that Reddit can (within reason) do whatever it wants with your posts and comments. Calling the content stolen is inaccurate: if youre a Reddit user, youre the product, and Reddit is the one selling. Personally, Im glad to see a company actually getting paid for providing AI training data, unlike the legal grey-area dodginess of previous chatbots and AI art tools that were trained on data scraped from the internet for free without user consent. By agreeing to the Reddit TOS, youre essentially consenting to your data being used for this. Google Gemini could stand to benefit hugely from the training data produced by this content use deal. (Image credit: Google) Some users are positively incensed by this though, claiming that if theyre the ones making the content, surely they should be entitled to a slice of the AI pie. Im going to hand out some tough love here: thats a ridiculous and naive argument. Do these people believe they deserve a cut of ad revenue too, since they made a hit post that drew thousands of people to Reddit? This isnt the same as AI creators quietly nabbing work from independent artists on Twitter. At the end of the day, youre never going to please everyone. If this deal has actual potential to improve not just Google Gemini, but Google Search in general (as well as Reddits site search), then the benefits arguably outweigh the costs - although I do think Reddit has a moral obligation to ensure that all of its users are fully informed about the use of their data. A few paragraphs in the TOS arent enough, guys: you know full well nobody reads those. You might also like Google Gemini explained: 7 things you need to know about the new Copilot and ChatGPT rival Hands on: Google Gemini the new Assistant has plenty of ideas ChatGPT is broken again and its being even creepier than usual but OpenAI says there's nothing to worry about ====================================================================== Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/are-you-a-reddit-u ser-googles-about-to-feed-all-your-posts-to-a-hungry-ai-and-theres-nothing-you -can-do-about-it --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64) * Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100) .