Reddit will start charging some users for API access — bad news for AI companies

Reddit is a popular social networking platform where millions of people engage in discussions on a wide variety of topics every day. For this reason, Reddit has valuable data that could be used by developers for a range of use cases — including training AI models. 

Reddit is now putting a halt to that, announcing on Tuesday that it will begin to charge big businesses for Reddit API data access. 

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The social networking platform added a new “premium access point” for third party users who require “additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights,” according to the announcement. 

The new tier won’t impact everyone, as developers and researchers who want to use Reddit’s API for non-commercial purposes such as developing apps that help people use Reddit or conducting academic research can still access it for free. 

The real target of the new tier are the massive companies, like Google and OpenAI, who have used Reddit’s data to train their generative AI models for free. 

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” said Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, in an interview with The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

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The chats that take place on Reddit’s platform are incredibly useful for training AI chatbots because they can help train the machine learning models on what human conversations look like, which then the AI chatbots can imitate in their own conversations. 

Twitter recently made a similar move by introducing API access tiers. This is also thought to be a response to generative AI models using its data. 

Today we are launching our new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our self-serve access. 🧵

— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) March 29, 2023

Twitter owner, Elon Musk, has publicly talked about his issues with advanced generative AI models. But he also recently revealed he’s working on his own AI chatbot.