‘Nothing is altering’: Reddit flatly denies report that it’d wall off its content material

The Washington Submit reported Friday that Reddit would possibly minimize off Google and power customers to log in to Reddit itself to learn something if it may’t attain offers with generative AI corporations to pay for its knowledge. However the firm tells The Verge that’s not true. “Nothing is altering,” says Reddit spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr.

The Washington Submit’s report wasn’t simply centered on Reddit — it’s about how greater than 535 information organizations have opted to dam their content material from being scraped by corporations like OpenAI to assist practice merchandise corresponding to ChatGPT. In line with the unique report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI corporations to get them to pay to make use of its knowledge, and if it couldn’t strike these agreements, it’d require logins to see content material. That might have the knock-on impact of stopping Reddit outcomes from displaying up in Google searches.

“Reddit can survive with out search,” mentioned the Submit’s nameless supply.

We received a style of what Google with out Reddit would possibly appear like when many subreddits went darkish to protest the corporate’s API pricing adjustments — at the moment, many Reddit outcomes took you to non-public communities, which was a ache. Appending “website:reddit.com” to a Google search has develop into a preferred trick for weeding search engine optimization farms and different attention-seeking web sites out of Google outcomes, and a pressured login would disrupt that.

Whereas the Reddit protests have been largely about how the API pricing adjustments would power some third-party app builders to close down their apps, Reddit’s authentic announcement concerning the pricing adjustments positioned them as a solution to get AI corporations to pay for hoovering up Reddit’s knowledge to coach massive language fashions. It wasn’t till later that the influence on app builders turned clear. (In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he mentioned that “we’re in talks” with AI corporations concerning the pricing adjustments. After I requested for extra particulars, he didn’t elaborate additional.)