cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/76533
One of the arguments made for Reddit’s API changes is that they are now the go to place for LLM training data (e.g. for ChatGPT).
I haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion around this and would like to hear people’s opinions. Are you concerned about your posts being used for LLM training? Do you not care? Do you prefer that your comments are available to train open source LLMs?
(I will post my personal opinion in a comment so it can be up/down voted separately)
I hope cross posts are OK. But I am curious about Experienced Dev’s perspective on this as well since the question is rather technical.
Copying my opinion from the other thread in case you don’t want to look at my other thread:
My personal opinion is that high API usage fees hurt open source LLMs (e.g. GPT4All). I would rather not see this new technology monopolized by those who can pay API fees.
I think the claim is nonsense. If that were their concern they would rather change the usage agreement and maybe take some of them to court.
What they actually did is everything in their power to drive mobile users to their mobile app. They want old fashioned user tracking data for advertising and selling on. Together with more in app ads.
I do not want my content to contribute to propertiery LLM that will make billion for large tech company without giving back to the community. Unfortunately I think fediverse have a harder time countering large scale data harvesting than a centralized service like reddit.
On the other hand, I don’t mind open source, privacy respecting (is this a thing for LLM?) LLM to use my content.
I am also wary of big tech companies using my comment history for their LLMs. However, I worry that the tech companies will scrape data anyway and Reddit’s API pricing just locks out the open source LLMs. There are a few of them, a couple that I have played with:
https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
Some projects even try to preserve privacy. But I think its more on the side of what extra training data you give it and the queries you issue.
Scraping open content is OK. Search engines have been doing that, it’s their main job.
LLM won’t exist without large inputs, hehe, and the internet is a good source for a big volume of language, most of which can even make sense.
I don’t feel like Reddit should be against LLMs, ignoring their bogus claims. At least I hope GitHub doesn’t share private and licenced repos.
I was wondering if someone would bring up search engine indexing. Google certainly has the upper hand for LLM training data with Reddit’s new API change since they have the comments anyway. This is a big reason I fear these API changes, it is very much concentrating power in the hands of already powerful companies.
Always has been meme.jpg
I really don’t think Reddit changed because of the AI, it’s just for the IPO, trying to pump and dump it sky high.
It’s really sad when you imagine what we could do as a species, if we could work together instead of trying to one-up each other.
It kind of brings me back to decentralized services, which for me is the ultimate freedom model, and I’m loving this alternative to Reddit.
I am cautiously optimistic about the decentralization and federation. But I think the biggest hurdle is developing the user base right now. ExperiencedDevs is the only subreddit I followed before this all started that directly linked a Lemmy alternative.
I think Reddit does have a legitimate argument that the scales have tipped and Reddit eating the costs of “whales” abusing their APIs for for-profit use cases without Reddit being compensated at all is fair.
3P apps using the API at no cost while simultaneously monetizing Reddit’s content by showing their own ads does seem to be taking advantage.
That said, the way Reddit approached this was so scorched earth and bone headed.
For example. Reddit gets 10s of millions of dollars in free content moderation services from volunteers. The moderators of all their biggest subreddits rely on 3P moderation tools since Reddit’s are so poor.
So with the new API policy, they’re asking their unpaid moderators to PAY them for the privilege. It’s such a slap in the face.
Finally to address the original question, Reddit should absolutely block API consumers who are just training their glorified chat bots to regurgitate plagerized content.
