Reddit said it first In its IPO next week, the company announced that licensing user posts to Google and others for AI projects could bring in $203 million in revenue over the next few years. The community-driven platform was forced to reveal on Friday that U.S. regulators already have questions about its new line of business.
Reddit received a letter from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday asking about “selling, licensing, or sharing user-generated content to train AI models with third parties,” the company said in a regulatory filing. said.
The FTC, the U.S. government’s primary antitrust regulator, has the authority to sanction companies found to engage in unfair or deceptive trade practices. The idea of licensing user-generated content for AI projects has drawn questions from lawmakers and rights groups about privacy risks, fairness, and copyright.
Reddit isn’t the only company trying to profit from using licensed data, including user-generated data, for AI. Programming Q&A site Stack Overflow has a deal with Google, The Associated Press has a deal with OpenAI, and Tumblr owner Automattic is working with “select AI companies,” but users have no control over their data. It said it would allow you to opt-out of such transfers. None of the licensors immediately responded to requests for comment. And Reddit isn’t the only company to receive an FTC letter regarding data licensing, Axios reported Friday, citing anonymous former officials.
It’s unclear whether the letter to Reddit is directly related to the reviews of other companies.
Reddit said in a disclosure Friday that it does not believe the company engaged in any unfair or deceptive conduct, but warned that responding to government investigations could be costly and time-consuming. did. “The letter indicates that FTC staff is interested in meeting with us to learn more about our plans and intends to request information and documents from us as the FTC continues its investigation. ”, the filing states. According to Reddit, the FTC’s letter states the investigation is related to a “private investigation.”
Reddit’s 17 billion posts and comments are considered valuable by AI experts for training chatbots in conversational skills, and last month it announced a deal to license the content to Google. Reddit and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FTC declined to comment.
AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, are seen as a competitive threat to Reddit, publishers, and other ad-supported, content-driven businesses. Last year, the possibility of licensing data to AI developers emerged as a potential benefit of generative AI for some companies.
But using data collected online to train AI models has raised many questions in boardrooms, courtrooms, and Congress. For Reddit and other companies whose data is generated by users, those questions include who really owns the content and whether it’s fair to license it without giving the creator a cut. Masu. Security researchers have discovered that AI models can leak personal data contained in the materials used to create them. And some critics suggest the deal could give powerful companies even more control.
