Skip to main content

Reddit is cracking down on AI bots

By
A screenshot of the Reddit mobile app.

In May, Reddit announced it would allow OpenAI to train its models on Reddit content for a price. Now, according to The Verge, Reddit will block most automated bots from accessing, learning from, and profiting from its data without a similar licensing agreement.

Reddit plans to do this by updating its robots.txt file, the "basic social contract of the web" that determines how web crawlers can access the site. Most nascent AI companies (including, at one point, OpenAI) train their models on content they've scraped from across the web without considering copyright or the Terms of Service of individual sites.

SEE ALSO: Reddit's traffic is way up – but why? It's Google.

Per The Verge's Alex Heath, search engines like Google got away with this form of scraping thanks to the "give-and-take" of Google sending traffic back to individual sites in exchange for the ability to crawl them for information. Now, AI companies are tipping the balance by taking that same information and providing it to users without sending them back to the sites the information came from.

Reddit's chief legal officer, Ben Lee, told The Verge that the parameters of robots.txt are not legally enforceable but that publicizing Reddit's intention to enforce its content policy is "a signal to those who don’t have an agreement with us that they shouldn’t be accessing Reddit data."

In a blog post about the change, Reddit noted that "good faith actors – like researchers and organizations... will continue to have access to Reddit content for non-commercial use." These include the Internet Archive, home to the Wayback Machine.



from Mashable https://ift.tt/aEYBevu
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Instagram accidentally reinstated Pornhub’s banned account

By
After years of on-and-off temporary suspensions, Instagram permanently banned Pornhub’s account in September. Then, for a short period of time this weekend, the account was reinstated. By Tuesday, it was permanently banned again. “This was done in error,” an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we’ve said previously, we permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies.” Instagram’s content guidelines prohibit  nudity and sexual solicitation . A Pornhub spokesperson told TechCrunch, though, that they believe the adult streaming platform’s account did not violate any guidelines. Instagram has not commented on the exact reasoning for the ban, or which policies the account violated. It’s worrying from a moderation perspective if a permanently banned Instagram account can accidentally get switched back on. Pornhub told TechCrunch that its account even received a notice from Instagram, stating that its ban had been a mistake (that message itse...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Nintendo Switch has been the US’s bestselling console for 23 straight months

By
Photo by James Bareham / The Verge It’s been a good two years for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, the gaming tablet has been the bestselling console in the US for 23 straight months. And according to data from the NPD Group, it just had its best October ever, moving 735,926 units of both the Switch and Switch Lite in the US. The company says that represents a 136 percent increase compared to last year. To date, the Switch has sold 22.5 million units in the US, and last week Nintendo revealed that more than 68 million units have been sold globally . “We’re excited about our momentum,” says Nick Chavez, Nintendo of America’s SVP of sales and marketing. Chavez puts the company’s big October down to two main factors. One is a better supply of stock; this year in particular, it’s often been hard to find a Switch on store shelves. This has only been exacerbated by increased demand due to a combination of the pandemic and the breakout success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons . ...
Post a Comment
Read more

MVP versus EVP: Is it time to introduce ethics into the agile startup model?

By
Anand Rao Contributor Share on Twitter Anand Rao is global head of AI at PwC . The rocket ship trajectory of a startup is well known: Get an idea, build a team and slap together a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of users. However, today’s startups need to reconsider the MVP model as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become ubiquitous in tech products and the market grows increasingly conscious of the ethical implications of AI augmenting or replacing humans in the decision-making process. An MVP allows you to collect critical feedback from your target market that then informs the minimum development required to launch a product — creating a powerful feedback loop that drives today’s customer-led business. This lean, agile model has been extremely successful over the past two decades — launching thousands of successful startups, some of which have grown into billion-dollar companies. However, building high-performing product...
Post a Comment
Read more