Reddit May Sue AI Firms if Business Conversations Fail

Legal actions against AI companies are increasing after The New York Times sued OpenAI for unauthorized use of its content. A senior official of Reddit has warned that the company is considering taking legal action against AI companies that are extracting data from their platform without permission.

Reddit may sue AI firms

The company was listed on the stock exchange last month and is the latest to speak about the illegitimate use of copyright material by AI firms to power their apps. The chief operating officer of Reddit, Jen Wong, said the companies should use their access to the information in an appropriate way.

“Reddit produces a stunning amount of fresh information every minute of every day based on human experience.”

She added further to that,

“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.”

Source: Thetimes.

The online forum hosts an enormous amount of data from two decades of human conversation present in text form, and now, with AI’s appetite for data, the company thinks that there is quite a significant commercial value in its hosted natural language data.

Reddit co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Huffman says that Reddit allows unrestricted interchange of communication on a range of different topics, from awe-inspiring to the laughable, from mundane to the profound, and from amusing to the serious, covering a vast information profile. 

We would prefer business talks

As said at the start, there are other examples of companies filing copyright infringement suits against AI firms, like the given example of OpenAI sued by The New York Times, and music publishers are going to court against Anthropic over the violation of copyrights for using lyrics. Anthropic is backed by the retail giant Amazon, which is also a cloud service provider.

Some content creators are also in negotiations with AI companies. The Associated Press news agency has licensed its content to OpenAI, while the parent company of The Times is also in talks with the artificial intelligence companies over the copyright use of its content, as its CEO, Robert Thomson, says that he is wooing the AI creators rather than litigating them.

Back in February, Reddit made a deal with Google that would allow the search giant to train its AI models, display the content, and use it in proper and satisfactory ways. According to Reddit’s COO, AI companies are continuously looking for data sources that are credible for making their models worthy of use, as training is a very essential part of AI development. She says that data licensing can be a feasible business for them.

Wong said they have their terms of service to use their data to assure that the data is used in a proper way. She says that there must be a dialogue on the commercial use of data and also decide if there is a partnership or otherwise there is an option for going to legal action. She said that among all these options, they will prefer discussions and partnerships.

Wong is also excited about AI other than pure business, as she wants to integrate translation functionalities into the web forum, which will help in increasing its reach and also create genuine global communities and genuine goal conversations where all can mingle.

The original story can be seen here.