Reddit considers legal action against AI firms for unauthorised use
Reddit would consider taking legal action against technology companies that extract data from its website without permission, a senior executive has warned.
The newly listed business is the latest to speak out against the unauthorised use of copyrighted information by artificial intelligence companies looking to power their technology.
Jen Wong, Reddit’s chief operating officer, said access to this information needed to be used “appropriately” by companies. “Reddit produces a stunning amount of fresh information every minute of every day based on human experience,” She said. “We believe in having people use our data for the purposes of learning and research to benefit others, but when that crosses over into commercialisation, that’s different.”
Jen Wong is the chief operating officer of Reddit
The online forum increasingly sees the commercial value in the natural language data on its platform, with almost two decades of conversations recorded in text form. Its 100,000 discussion groups, called “subreddits”, allow free-flowing conversations on topics ranging from “the sublime to the ridiculous, the trivial to the existential, the comic to the serious”, according to Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and chief executive.
There are already examples of generative AI businesses being taken to court over their alleged illegal use of information owned by other companies. In the United States, The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft, while music publishers are suing Anthropic, whose backers include Amazon, over the infringement of copyrights in lyrics.
Other content creators are trying to negotiate with the AI creators. News Corp, the parent owner of The Times, has said that it is in discussion with AI firms over the use of its copyright, with Robert Thomson, its chief executive, declaring he was “wooing, not suing” the technology businesses. The Associated Press news service already has a licensing deal in place with OpenAI.
Wong would not single out specific companies for criticism. Reddit signed a partnership with Google in February, which would allow the Silicon Valley powerhouse to “display, train on and otherwise use it in the most accurate and relevant ways”.
Wong said: “Training is incredibly important and folks are continuing to look for data sources that are valuable for making their models better. So that is a viable business for us, data licensing. I think it’s opened our eyes to the opportunities of how we format and let users access the corpus that we have.
“We have terms of service that make sure that our data is being used appropriately. When it’s used for a commercial purpose, you have to have a conversation about that. You can have a conversation, decide whether there is a partnership, you can go all the way to legal action. I think all of those are options, but we lean toward partnerships and discussion.”
Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both 40, who were college roommates at the University of Virginia. They went through Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator accelerator programme run by Sam Altman, 38, the chief executive of OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker.
Reddit was bought by Condé Nast, the owner of Vogue magazine, in 2006, was spun out as a subsidiary in 2011 and since then has raised substantial sums from high-profile investors and celebrities. In 2014, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Snoop Dogg and Jared Leto contributed to a $50 million investment round, which was led by Altman.
After several years of waiting for the right moment, Reddit was launched on the stock market at the end of March. Since then its shares, which were priced at $34 when they were floated, have risen to about $45.
Wong said “I don’t watch the share price every day. My view is, it’s our job to deliver results. We do what we say we’re going to do and we are confident that the value will follow. And we take a long-term view on our business.”
Copyright aside, when it came to AI, Wong said she was most excited about adding translation capabilities into the platform to broaden its reach and to create “truly global communities, truly global conversations”.