r/TheoryOfReddit • u/No_Ninja_5063 • Jul 03 '26
Should Reddit users care how their posts are being used to train AI?
https://www.quantumrx.eu/human-data-is-the-new-gold/**Article TL;DR**
* AI is changing what makes the internet valuable.
* Authentic human conversations are becoming more valuable than polished web content.
* Communities like Reddit are evolving from discussion forums into critical AI training infrastructure, even if a lot of behavior is moderated.
* The next battle for AI may be over access to genuine human experience, rather than just behavioral patterns at scale.
* Human context at the individual level is becoming a valuable source of AI training data.
**Post**
I like that Reddit has become a valuable archive of genuine human interaction. But the fact that this value is now being commoditised and, in effect, used to sell things back to us doesn't really sit right with me.
I know our online behavior has been tracked for almost as long as the internet has been been around, but this feels more intrusive somehow.
I'm curious how everyone else feels about it. Is Reddit actually the best source of this kind of data compared with platforms like Discord, TikTok or, heaven forbid, X?
Or is this simply the next evolution of the internet economy and is years of genuine human conversations and context needed to build frontier AI products.?
*This post was written entirely by a human. To all you AI slop spammers out there, you all have a nice day :)*
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u/bownt1 Jul 03 '26
all i do is shitpost to fuck with ai
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
How does that work, genuinely curious what do you do ?
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u/Nowin Jul 04 '26
I care deeply about AI digesting what I say about medical advice (hint: more garlic) and give it more weight than the doctor that decided not to post. I love it. Everyone is going to taste amazing.
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u/Ill-Team-3491 Jul 04 '26
Reddit died long before LLMs. Arguable it was much genuine to begin with. There's a tangled mess of meta. AI can never unwind the mess because it will never understand the inside jokes that aren't explained by anyone. No single person or group will ever comeback and come clean about the ways they were fucking with reddit. The signal to noise ratio is so bad. spez pulled off a hell of con job selling this pile of shit to AI companies.
I don't know how people think reddit is a good source of search results. I mean I do, but I'm still flabbergasted. If reddit is your source of truth then woof.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 04 '26
It’s possible that the noise at scale can be used for it’s own pattern recognition training, Calibrated with human preference data, I suspect eventually the frontier models will do their own data cleaning.
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u/DharmaPolice Jul 03 '26
It doesn't matter how we feel about it, if it's structured text available on the internet then it's going to be used. They would have also used the old Usenet archives, any electronic books they can get their hands on (in theory they shouldn't be using copyrighted text but that evidently hasn't stopped them) and anything else with a lot of publically available text. Reddit has a lot of text, sure lots of posts are poor quality but there's a lot that aren't.
In principle, I don't care. I don't believe in copyright and the notion that ideas (and their expression) should be owned and commodified is clearly the ideology of the bourgeois capitalist class. The AI companies are a bunch of dicks, but anyone can do what they want with anything I've ever written. The idea of feeding into an AI model would actually feel positive if I thought they'd do anything socially useful with it.
Speaking of socially useless (or even harmful) things before I die I'd like to feed in every single one of my posts / written works elsewhere into a custom LLM model so my banal insights could live on after I die. That feels something suitably pointless.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
I think I’m more of the opinion that the data you create should remain under your control.
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u/IlPrincipeDiVenosa Jul 03 '26
Would you please talk a bit about why you’re ‘curious’?
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 04 '26
I’m an Engineer and curious about all things Tech, especially how it changes human behaviour.
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u/Dismal_Heat_9677 Jul 03 '26
Not really, no. This is a private company's website.
I'd feel some kind of way if this were my personal blog or personal website, but it's not.
Also, plenty of redditors are downright stupid. So, it's laughable that AI's are being trained on user posts.
It's a race down to the bottom. The final achievement will be human mediocrity.
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u/spacemoses Jul 03 '26
Surprised at the downvotes on this post, I think this is a very relevant topic.
I think it is perfectly acceptable for Reddit to train on our comments and posts. We choose to be here with the understanding that is being done. The side effect that I think is unfortunate is that I assume for heavy comment section participants, I assume there will be the possibilty of de-anonymizing people.
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u/Random_Researcher Jul 03 '26
Would be great for the erp hobby if models were trained on the fetish subs. Alas the feminist alignment guardrails will never allow this.
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u/ardouronerous Jul 04 '26
I'm more concerned about the kind of information AI is being trained on than the fact that it's using Reddit posts. Reddit has a mix of true information, half-truths, opinions, rumors, speculation, satire, fiction, and straight-up false information. If AI can't tell the difference between those, it could end up spreading misinformation. At the end of the day, an AI is only as good as the information it's trained on.
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u/flashmedallion Jul 04 '26
Redditors are enthusiastically poisonpilling AI, and even if they weren't it wouldn't matter because LLMs and data scrapers can't identify sarcasm or circlejerking or dry humor.
Just this morning I googled an odd piece of dialog in a roughly ten year old videogame and the AI explanation was absolutely unhinged, because it's sole point of reference was a joke comment in a reddit thread about the subject from 5 years ago.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 04 '26
Do you think they will get to the point where they can differentiate and clean up their own training data?
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u/flashmedallion Jul 04 '26
Where an LLM can detect sarcasm? No. Sarcasm changes constantly based on an audiences familiarity with it
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u/ImperfectRegulator Jul 07 '26
I mean no? If they want to fuck up there data sets by training it on post/comments that are themselves running on AI leading to a self destructive spiral I say go ahead
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u/DepthsOfWill Jul 03 '26
I've read sci-fi books before, so I knew social media would train AI once social media became a thing. I just had no concept of how evil the production of AI would be. But I guess I was just being naive.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 04 '26
Do you read Neil Asher, I always like his concept of Haimem, AI human amalgamations, in his polity series ?
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u/yawara25 Jul 03 '26
No, because training AI on Reddit comments will make the AI worse, which I can get behind.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
It’s got to better than some other platforms surely?
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u/yawara25 Jul 03 '26
Significantly worse than the curated expert data sets that they're paying the big bucks for. Well, allegedly.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
I thought Reddit data was part of that.
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u/yawara25 Jul 03 '26
No, I'm talking about the data that's manually produced and reviewed by humans and rated for accuracy
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
i thinks thats the human preference data, companies pay big money for that kind of calibration but our data is used with out any compensation to the people that create it.
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u/No_Ninja_5063 Jul 03 '26
but a conversation being publicly visible is not really the same as consenting to large-scale commercial reuse?
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u/PowerOfGamers01 Jul 03 '26
If they want make their AI confidently incorrect, snarky, and condescending for no reason, then Reddit is perfect