Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement.
Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren’t Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol (txt file) to block bots from scraping the site. The file reads: “Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content.” Since the news broke, OpenAI announced SearchGPT, which can show recent Reddit results.
The change came a year after Reddit began its efforts to stop free scraping, which Huffman initially framed as an attempt to stop AI companies from making money off of Reddit content for free. This endeavor also led Reddit to begin charging for API access (the high pricing led to many third-party Reddit apps closing).
In an interview with The Verge today, Huffman stood by the changes that led to Google temporarily being the only search engine able to show recent discussions from Reddit. Reddit and Google signed an AI training deal in February said to be worth $60 million a year. It’s unclear how much Reddit’s OpenAI deal is worth.
Huffman said:
Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used.
“[It’s been] a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” Huffman told The Verge.
Honestly, my biggest issue with LLMs is how they source their training data to create “their own” stuff. A meme calling it a plagiarism machine struck a chord with me. Almost anyone else I’d sympathize with, but fuck Spez.
What resonated with me is people calling LLMs and Stable Diffusion “copyright laundering”. If copyright ever swung in AI’s favor it would be super easy to train an AI on stuff you want to steal, add in some generic training, and now you have a “new” piece of art.
LLMs and Stable Diffusion are just compression algorithms for abstract patterns, only one level above data.
The real takeaway of all of this is that copyright law is massively out of date and not fit for purpose in the 21st century or frankly the late 20th.
The current state of copyright law cannot deal with the internet, let alone AI
Robots.txt isn’t a binding agreement, this isn’t stopping anyone for whom their drive for profit outweighs their ethics.
Also, Fuck Spez.
Honestly, any platforms hosting user-generated content who use the legal argument that they only provide hosting and aren’t responsible for what their user post shouldn’t also be able to sell the same data and claim owning any of it.
Otherwise, take away their legal immunity. Nazis or pedophiles post something awful? You get in front of the judge.
edit: typo
Can’t sell something you don’t own.
So if they’re selling the parts people want, they need to own the parts no one wants.
Well, you can give money to Reddit for a piece of paper, but unless Reddit is claiming copyright to the content posted there, then they can’t sue anyone for not paying. It would be very interesting to see the text of these “licensing agreements”.
They’re not claiming copyright. They have a perpetual, non-revokable license to the content, granted by the people who use their site when they post the content.
Exactly this. You can claim that their scraping is abusing your servers, but the moment you claim copyright for the content of the site, then you give up your Section 230 rights.
You’d also probably lose a whole lot more processing power trying to stop the crawlers vs just letting them have API access with some sort of limit to queries.
Systems admin here: You’ll lose almost the same amount of processing time looking up limits and providing a “you’re over your credits / rate limit” as you would by just providing the data.
Also, everyone will game the system with multiple accounts (cost be damned, the entities who want the data have cash to burn).
I don’t think they actually block malicious bots, the change they’ve made is just to the robots.txt, they don’t have to do anything.
Robots.txt does literally nothing. It’s a piece of courtesy that’s easily ignored if you don’t care.
Yeah but it stops bing and a bunch of AI scrapers that want to act like they’re following the rules
How do we know it stops bing? As far as anyone knows they could have instructed their programmers to alter the crawlers so that it ignores robots.txt when on Reddit - that should have taken them a whole 2 minutes.
Reddit blocking any search crawler via robots.txt is such a non thing that it shouldn’t even be reported.
Ok but they do respect it, we know that https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-confirms-reddit-blocked-bing-search-444385
They even have a page telling you how to use it https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/June-2008/Robots-Exclusion-Protocol-joining-together-to-pro/
Fuck Spez. He’s probably editing the comments anyway, he literally can’t help himself.
Fuck Spez
Damn I feel sorry for the guy now /s
