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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you but not in entirety. This comment from spez[0] about blaming the API price changes on LLM's is too far fetched.

A lot of commenters here on HN have already pointed that out already too. Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model.

You could get it down to a science where you only scrape any new data whenever you train the next model.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

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Yeah I think their real intention is to kill off third party Reddit apps so people are forced to use their own app, with all its tracking and garbage.

Reddit on mobile browser is a case study of insane dark patterns

Click to sort comments while not logged in? A popup appears asking to log in, with no close button. You have to click out of the box, but that’s not easily apparent

View an 18+ subreddit? Let them browse for 30 seconds, then ask they log in

Visit the site? Ask to login or use their app.

At this point, I’m more motivated to do anything but use their app if they’re this hellbent on getting me to download it.

This exactly, it’s unuseable and will only get worse. When “old” stops working it’ll be a sad, sad day. This blackout has made me realize how deeply I’ll miss reddit.

The thing is, to me, reddit would never be a viable enterprise without the volunteers moderation. If reddit had to pay for that they’d never ipo. And if they think the moderators will stay and be exploited they’re wrong. Thus if they go through with this they’ll fail as a public company. There is no there where they going.

Yeah they've been trying to kill old.reddit and third party apps for a long time. The experience degrades more and more as they add new features that are only fully supported (or supported at all) on new.reddit and the official app. This has been going on for years.

I'm convinced that this would have happened with or without OpenAI, especially with the mirage of an IPO on the horizon. Controlling the client to show ads and siphon data is just too valuable. Maybe the OpenAI thing pushed them to speed up the process.

I'd also point out, it's not like the pricing of the API is going to be uniform for everyone anyway - spez has already said/conceded that certain users of the API can continue to use it for free (above the free limits). At that point it's a deliberate decision to make 3rd party apps pay the same price as AI companies, if they wanted to keep 3rd party apps around they could have set a different more reasonable price point for them or went another route (Ex. require 3rd party app users to have Premium).

I think he's bullshitting even on API costs to maintain. They could just put it into reddit premium "want to use API ? Pay few bucks and use app of your choosing". Even $2 would easily cover the cost of lost ads and such. Then a much more expensive tier above for "data ingestors".

> , that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model.

How would that work from a legal perspective, though?

Let's say there's no paywall and Reddit's terms of use disallow unauthorized commercial use of their data. Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?

It is OpenAI's and Microsoft's position that obtaining, using for training, and displaying data via AI is fair use.

I really really really hope the copilot and other suits are successful. The idea that you can literally steal content in the name of “””AI””” and profit off it is just insane! How is it not like copyright infringement? The Warhol case is just one step behind training data. It’s basically the same idea.

Interesting question but sadly I am in no position to answer it.

I think there are probably issues to address with scraping it blindly:

- Can Reddit imprint its data somehow? A watermark?

- Can Reddit prove that certain type of information appeared on Reddit first and thus that serves as proof its data was used without authorization?

If OpenAI can't work around this, I'm not sure they would be willing to cross any lines in terms of copyright, they've already done it with ChatGPT and I am guessing rules are only going to get stricter on this topic.

I think the bottom line is that Microsoft’s (and thus other for-profit AI initiatives) stance is that any and all data is fair game regardless of license or authorization. This results, in their opinion, from the fact that the AI alters the data, changes the output, and is otherwise “inspired” by the data in the same way an artist might be inspired by another without copyright infringement.

This sounds very dodgy. Will somebody be checking the degree of such "data alteration" and verify that the "AI" is actually inspired rather than copying?

To me this feels like its opening up the door for the elimination of copyright as any algorithmic layer interjected between scrapped data and end users could claim to be "inspired".

Welcome to the discussion lol. People have already provided examples of copilot producing niche code verbatim thereby proving their intuition incorrect. It’s a whole mess that will take years to be cleaned up by new legal conventions.

If my compiler was “inspired” by leaked Windows source code and altered it into a new form then I think their opinions on the matter would be very different.

Not a great example: if Apple’s code leaked, theoretically they wouldn’t include it in the training as it’s not supposed to be seen by the public. If it’s public you can be inspired by it (so their logic goes).

The true malicious, and probably effective, approach is to silently poison outputs if you suspect automated behaviour. These large language model things might be useful there. Or the old school NLP stuff.

> Wouldn't that be a violation of Reddit's terms and liable to some legal procedure?

It won't, with the LinkedIn vs HiQ precedent.

How does Google use Reddit's data in its models? You can access most (all?) Reddit pages without hitting Reddit at all via the "Cached" link in the search results.

Does Google have a special agreement with Reddit (and all other sites?) or is it legally "fair use" to reproduce web pages that are available freely online?

I think that's a different legal question than LLM training, but webpage caching has been found to be fair use based on a number of factors: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/google-cache-does...

Reddit's terms are irrelevant. Unless Reddit requires a login to view its site (which would also prevent Google indexing), anyone can view the data without agreeing to the terms.

The only question is copyright, but I find it hard to argue that LLM training is not sufficiently transformative in 99% of cases.

Plus Reddit doesn't own the copyright to the posts, the users do.

In the US at least the courts has made it clear that scrapping is legal.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

Reddit don't own the copyright to it, just a license. That plus public web scraping is legal. Reproducing the data directly might violate the user's copyrights, but through an LLM it is assumed not.

>Unless they build a literal brick wall (paywall) around the site, that data can and will get scraped if the intention is to use for a model.

The irony if lowtax and :10bux: ends up being right all along about how to build a community...

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