If Microsoft wants to include Reddit posts in Bing’s search results and the company’s artificial intelligence training, it looks like it’s going to have to pay a price.
According to a new interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman by The Verge, Reddit expects Microsoft to pay like Google if it wants to crawl its site again.
“Without these agreements, we have no say or understanding of how our data is displayed or used, which puts us now in the position of blocking those who don’t want our data to be used or not. used,” explained Huffman, citing how companies like Google and Microsoft use Reddit data to train their artificial intelligence models.
Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT
Reddit wants search engines to pay for artificial intelligence training
Last week, technology media 404 media According to reports, Reddit block Search engines such as Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo crawl the platform and index its pages. As a result, recent Reddit posts will no longer appear in Bing or DuckDuckGo search results.
Google is one of the search engines that still offers Reddit posts in its search results. This is thanks to $60 million trade Google and Reddit agreed to allow the search giant to train its artificial intelligence models on Reddit’s data.
Mix and match speed of light
In addition to Google, Reddit has also signed a deal with OpenAI, which will now include Reddit posts in search results for its new product. Search GPT Search for products.
Hoffman specifically cited Microsoft and artificial intelligence companies Anthropic and Perplexity as examples of companies currently blocked for not negotiating how Reddit data will be used.
The Reddit CEO also noted that “it’s a real pain in the butt to stop these companies,” but claimed it was necessary, especially in light of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s ) commented that publicly accessible data on the open web amounts to “free software” and is therefore fair game for AI model training.
Reddit certainly has legitimate concerns about AI companies training models on material without compensating the platforms they are scraping and crawling. However, the side effect of Reddit content disappearing from search engines is also unfortunate and does not bode well for the future of the web.
However, these seem to be the consequences of search engine companies now also becoming artificial intelligence companies.
Mashable has reached out to Reddit for confirmation and comment and will update if we hear back.
