Reddit is taking a stand in opposition to AI corporations — or at the very least asking them to pay up.
Earlier this week, Reddit announced that it’s altering its Robots Exclusion Protocol, often known as its robots.txt file. This dry-sounding edit is a component of a bigger negotiation/battle between the AI corporations which might be hungry for content material they will use to coach their language fashions, and the businesses that truly personal the content material.
“Robots.txt” is how web sites talk to 3rd events how a web site may be crawled — the traditional instance being web sites that enable Google to crawl them to allow them to be included in search outcomes.
Within the case of AI, the worth trade is quite a bit much less apparent. Once you run a web site whose enterprise mannequin includes attracting clicks and eyeballs, there’s not a lot attraction in letting AI corporations hoover up your content material after which they don’t ship you any visitors — and in some circumstances, they outright plagiarize your work.
So by altering its robots.txt file, and likewise by persevering with to fee restrict and block unknown bots and crawlers, Reddit appears to be working to forestall the practices that corporations like Perplexity AI have been criticized for.
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