‘Nothing is changing’ — Reddit is denying a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content if it can’t reach deals with AI companies::Reddit initially denied a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content. However, the Post says it may still block search crawlers, and Reddit didn’t deny to The Verge that it may do so.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as ChatGPT.
According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.
That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.
(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.
X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.
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