Your Reddit posts will now help Google train its AI
Training AI to think and behave like a human being means teaching it about humans. This can come from a variety of sources, and it looks like Reddit is one of them. Google and Reddit have announced a partnership where they will be using posts on Reddit to help train its AI.
Reddit is one of the biggest forums on the internet and is home to a vast catalog of user-generated content. It’s a perfect place for Google to train its AI on, especially when it comes to understanding natural language, context, and more, and obviously this isn’t going to be free.
According to a report from Reuters, Google is said to be paying Reddit $60 million a year. It’s interesting because some of you might remember that in 2023, Reddit announced that they would start charging developers access to its API. This resulted in many third-party Reddit apps shutting down.
Reddit claimed that many companies were using its API to train its AI without paying. It is also interesting because in the past, Google has butted heads with various publishers. Many publishers felt that it was unfair for Google to scrap their content without being paid. Now it looks like in a bid to train its AI, Google has decided to pay Reddit for it.
This shouldn’t really have any effect on the end-user. With all this data Google now has access to, we should be able to expect smarter generative AI capabilities in the future.