Google and Reddit have reportedly entered a partnership that would see user data from the popular social media platform used to train AI models for the big tech firm.
The partnership will likely be a big step for Google and its many AI iterations in competing with ChatGPT, which currently sits as the most popular AI chatbot available today.
Still, the idea of using Reddit data to train AI models from Google has ruffled a few feathers, namely the Reddit users that will be effectively contributing their thoughts on queries to the evolution of the technology.
Reddit and Google Partnership on AI
Announced in blog posts from Reddit and Google, the social forum platform is furthering its existing partnership with Google in hopes of better integrating the two services.
Given the fact that many Google searches already end in “reddit,” this could have a notable impact on the experience of users across both systems.
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“Over the years, we’ve seen that people increasingly use Google to search for helpful content on Reddit to find product recommendations, travel advice and much more. We know people find this information useful, so we’re developing ways to make it even easier to access across Google products.” – Google blog post
The goal is to “enhance search and other capabilities on the Reddit platform,” so users already searching on Google for Reddit responses will have even more information at their fingertips.
What Will This Partnership Do?
To be clear, though, this advanced partnership between Google and Reddit will do a lot more than improve integration between the platforms. In fact, Google is getting full access to the Reddit Data API, which will provide a whole lot of information to the big tech firm.
“This enhanced collaboration provides Google with an efficient and structured way to access the vast corpus of existing content on Reddit and enables Google to use the Reddit Data API to improve its products and services – including supporting new ways to display Reddit content and providing more efficient ways to train models.” – Reddit blog post
Effectively, the end of this quote refers to the fact that the mountains upon mountains of human-powered data available on Reddit will be used to train AI models for Google, and that doesn’t sit right with a lot of users.
How Do Reddit Users Feel?
As you can imagine, Reddit users are particularly pumped about their forums, threads, queries, and general thoughts being used to train AI models for Google. This highlights a frequent problem with AI, in that it merely uses existing content to create images, text, and other content, pushing the boundaries of copyright infringement.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much Reddit users can do. The terms and conditions of their favorite social forum platform expressly note that the content on Reddit is owned by the company.
Let’s be honest, though, this has been the way it works for big tech firms. After all, if the service is free, you and your data are the product. Granted, this is more advanced than using your data to send you targeted ads, but if you’re worried about the privacy of your user data, the internet probably isn’t the best place for you.
