12/20/2023

As the AI Era Begins, Reddit is Leaning Into its Humanity

This year, AI has captured more attention than anyone expected

Among the things that 2023 will be remembered for is the vast amount of time the tech industry spent fretting about ever-smarter AI someday overpowering the people who created it. But one of the year’s major tech stories was the tale of an uprising that actually happened—and it was all about people, not machines.

In April, Reddit announced that it would begin charging heavy users of its API—the firehose of data from its 100,000 communities (or "subreddits"), where people share stuff on everything from science to skateboarding. As cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman explained to The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, the company was concerned by how AI giants, such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, were mining the wealth of knowledge in its discussion threads to train chatbots, thereby creating new competition for Reddit while it footed the bill.

However, other users of the free API—from third-party clients such as the beloved Apollo to products that made Reddit content accessible to disabled people to subreddits with explicit content—were also in the move’s blast radius. And in June, discontent among Reddit moderators over the changes led to outright revolt. They shut down thousands of subreddits, sometimes for extended periods—a protest that, though sweeping and disruptive, did not result in major changes to Reddit's plans.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.