Reddit to charge for API access; CEO blames A.I. | Fortune
redditapi-accessdata-scrapingai-trainingllm-data
Abstraction: Reddit monetizing API access to prevent free AI training data extraction
Key points:
- Reddit announced a paid "premium access" tier to its API effective June 19, 2023, targeting companies requiring higher usage limits and broader rights
- CEO Steve Huffman cited AI companies as the impetus: both Google and OpenAI have previously used Reddit data to train LLMs (GPT-2, Bard)
- Huffman: "Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with"
- Free API access will reportedly end for third-party reader apps; developers improving Reddit's own experience and researchers would retain free access
- The move mirrors Elon Musk's Twitter API pricing change (monthly fees of tens of thousands of dollars), though Reddit's motivations also include pre-IPO monetization
- Using user-generated content for AI training without consent is contested; artists and creators have raised copyright concerns with image generators like Stable Diffusion
Connections: Reddit · Openai · Google · Large Language Models · Data Scraping · AI Regulation