> It's so easy to think of other ways this could have been handled.
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.
I don't think Reddit was telling the truth either.
But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on, and a sufficiently expensive API at least forces them to do engineering work to get all the data. So at the time I believed Reddit's reasoning.
>But AI developers/companies seem to almost universally believe they have fair-use rights to train their models on any data they can get their hands on
Google and many other companies for almost 2 decades have spent their time scraping petabytes of data from the web. A lot of that with no expectation of payment. Some companies became billionaires off of that ability to freely access mass bulks of data.
Data scraping has always been a grey area, but I find it strange how it's suddenly taken a turn for some people whenever modern AI comes up. We can't really be drawing lines based on what we feel is good/evil, because we will never agree as a whole on what is good/evil.
They could have set up a signature with 3rd party apps, those apps could have have charged the apps a couple bucks/required ads in the feeds from reddit/etc. Instead they wanted 100% control and 100% of the data. This isn't -just- about killing off AI scrapers, this is about sending a message that reddit is 100% under the CEO's control for when they have the IPO. Wallstreet does not like "free" stuff, all they see are cost centers and profit centers.
Well, assuming Reddit executives were telling the truth about their goals/needs, which I don't think they are.
They claim the purpose was some kind of emergency band-aid to stop the service from hemorrhaging cash from evil large-scale data-sucking AI developers without compensation... But in that case, they could have simply introduced it as a fresh terms-of-service restriction, with some payment-tier to come later that permits that use of the data.