Reddit announced on Tuesday that the big tech companies will have to pay first before getting access to its application programming interface (API). Companies like Google and OpenAI depend on the API of websites with a rich source of information to train their AI models.
Reddit Aims to Monetize Its Pool of User-Generated Information
Reddit's API is important for the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT as their users are allowed to download and process information coming from Reddit's long list of conversations. However, with the company's recent announcement, tech giants can no longer train their AI chatbots for free with the use of Reddit's API, as reported by Gizmodo.
The report first came from the New York Times, as Reddit revealed a "new premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights." For now, Reddit has not yet specified the exact charge for big tech companies, but the company said that it will update its Terms and Conditions to explain which cases of using Reddit's pool of information will require payment.
Once the Terms and Conditions are updated, developers and third-party entities will receive a notification telling them that the changes will take effect within 60 days. However, it would appear that Reddit is more concerned about charging the big companies over the small ones. The company is not likely to charge entities using Reddit for strictly academic and non-commercial purposes, as well as the small-time developers that helped them in developing Reddit.
Reddit's announcement aims to monetize the user-generated content on their platform, something that AI models have been taking advantage of since the dawn of artificial intelligence on the Internet. Reddit has over 430 million monthly active users coming from more than 1.2 million communities as of 2019, all of which are willingly sharing curated information and content daily.
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Reddit Seeks to Get a Slice of Pie from AI Companies
Reddit's founder, Steve Huffman, told the New York Times that it's the right time for the company to "tighten things up" given that the big companies are able to profit from the endless threads of information available on Reddit.
"Crawling Reddit, generating value, and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with," Huffman said, arguing that charging tech giants for their API is only fair because Reddit is valuable for AI models since the information there is continuously updated.
"The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," Huffman added. "More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation. There's a lot of stuff on the site that you'd only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all... But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."
