Publishers with original online content shouldn’t be giving it away for free to train LLMs operated by billion-dollar AI companies. Reddit figured it out, and is about to shut off the spigot of free text content to Google, Microsoft, and others. (Even though its user-generated text, people give the discussion platform a basically unlimited license to do what it wants, so Reddit users don’t have much of a say in the matter).
“Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything, if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.”
Hold on. Isn’t Reddit shooting itself in the foot, by cutting off search? Not really. It has very tight bonds with its audiences, and can afford to go dark.
Other publishers with original content – blogs, commercial content, user comments, marketing copy, whatever – should be considering the same approach for anything outside of the home page. Because Google is so overrun with SEO junk and paid results, many publishers won’t be losing much by stopping crawlers. It gives them leverage to work with LLM developers who are willing to pay for original text content.
The next logical step for a company like Reddit, with solid tech talent in addition to a deep well of original text content? Developing or co-developing its own LLM. Other big publishers can do this too, while smaller publishers will be able to join consortiums or clearinghouses. The tools aren’t there yet, and there is still a debate over LLMs freely using copyrighted data per “fair use,” but the verdict is still out on the legality of this approach.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m not happy with large companies like Google feeding my content into its LLMs without permission or compensation. If they want their customers to benefit from generative AIs, whether it’s making better customer service bots or writing low-quality AI books with ChatGPT, they need to get permission from publishers and pay up.