According to a report by the Washington Post last Friday, the aggregation news website Reddit is discussing data payment with the AI ​​giant. If the two parties cannot reach an agreement, Reddit may cut off services to Google and Bing, that is, prohibit crawlers of Google, Bing and other search engines from obtaining content from the platform.

This will force users to log into their Reddit accounts to get the information they want. In other words, Reddit content will not show up in Google and Bing searches.

In this regard, the subsequent corrective report by The Washington Post and the latest report by The Verge pointed out that Reddit denied the above-mentioned report’s statement that it “forces users to log in to the platform to view content.” As for “blocking search engine crawlers,” the official did not deny it. The source also said, "Reddit can survive without search (site)."

Reddit is the most visited news website by Americans, where users can create and share content. It is known as the "American version of Baidu Tieba". Reddit currently has more than 130,000 active communities. According to the company's data at the end of 2020, it has more than 1.5 billion registered users, 430 million monthly active users, and 52 million daily active users.

Training AIGC tools requires massive amounts of data, and Reddit has accumulated a large amount of user-generated content, which is high-quality AI training data. This company has found business opportunities from this.

In April, Reddit announced that it would charge data usage fees to companies that use its API to train AI chatbots, including Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, etc.; in June, its higher-than-industry-average charging standards were revealed - US$12,000 per 50 million API requests.

If the huge data assets provide Reddit with the possibility of charging, its listing plan reminds Reddit of the necessity of charging.

Reddit is targeting an eventual IPO later this year — likely in the second half of the year, people familiar with the matter said. Reddit and other companies including Instacart are updating their IPO documents to prepare for a possible IPO when market conditions improve.

Is the era of free data coming under pressure from multiple parties on AI giants?

At the moment,The AIGC wave is sweeping through companies with data assets, and companies such as Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) are waiting to be sold. It is understood that X’s pricing is higher than Reddit’s. According to WIRED’s previous report, the cheapest package provided by

Newspaper publishers represent companies that choose to build high walls. The Washington Post reported that since August, at least 535 news organizations (including the New York Times, Reuters and the Washington Post) have installed blockers to prevent their content from being crawled by companies such as OpenAI and used to train products such as ChatGPT.

The purpose is the same -Hope to get a share of the AIGC market. IAC, the media group that owns The Daily Beast, is trying to create a coalition of publishers aimed at winning billions of dollars from AI companies through lawsuits or legislative action, Semafor reported in July. In August, NPR reported that The New York Times was also considering filing a lawsuit against OpenAI.

In addition to the charging requirements of large companies, large AI companies are also facing pressure from individuals. A large number of authors, artists and software programmers are filing copyright lawsuits against them, demanding compensation for infringement losses and sharing of profits. According to previous reports, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has joined as a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Meta, Microsoft and Bloomberg, accusing them of using pirated books to train AI.

According to Bloomberg, this market (data charging market) is expected to reach US$1.3 trillion by 2032.

certainly,Behind the charges, it is not just a question of money. Many companies regard data usage as a matter of survival, and are worried that AI will learn something from their own data and poach their own users. For example, Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of StackOverflow, a question-and-answer platform for programmers, said that one month after OpenAI launched GPT-4, the traffic of the coding community StackOverflow dropped by 15% as programmers turned to AI to seek answers to coding questions. He believes that artificial intelligence has been trained by StackOverflow data.

The latest news shows that StackOverflow has laid off 28% of its employees.

At present, both media groups and mainstream social platforms are still in a tug-of-war with AI giants over whether and how to pay. Companies with different say rights will get different results.