Reddit’s set to rake in $60M per year in a deal with an unnamed AI company to train future models on its 20 years’ worth of user generated content

If you’ve ever posted to Reddit there’s a good chance you’re helping train the next generation of AI models with your own words, pictures, and memes, because the company’s selling access to its 20 years’ worth of content for a reported $60 million. I mean, chances are you’ve already been used to train AIs given that Reddit’s already featured pretty heavily in the training data for a bunch of different large language models (LLMs) and image generators, but at least now someone’s getting paid for it.

Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, need to be trained on databases comprising hundreds of millions of images, books, video clips, music, and so on. Sometimes, the source is publicly available and open to use by anyone, and sometimes AI companies simply ‘borrow’ what’s just lying around on the web. But there’s seldom any money handed over between the two bodies. Not so with Reddit, as it seems that it’s entered into a deal where for a healthy lump of cash each year, an AI model can use the site’s content for training.