Comment on Reddit blocking all major search engines, except Google

Vanth@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Around here we love the idea of Reddit being totally devoid of life but the fact is it’s still one of the most active public facing sites on the web. The attrition to sites like Lemmy pretty negligible to the overall Reddit activity and bot AI activity only really affects the largest subreddits which have always been a bit spammy and click batey. The medium and small subreddits are still full of active people.

  Additionally, exclusivity with Google isn’t necessary just to keep the search results but to prevent their biggest AI competition ChatGPT and their ties to Microsoft from getting access to what is the Internet’s largest database of public facing conversation.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I wonder what kind of contract they went with.

  reuters.com/…/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-wi…

  The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources.

  SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s artificial intelligence models, three people familiar with the matter said.

  The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources.

  For perspective:

  cbsnews.com/…/google-reddit-60-million-deal-ai-tr…

  In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Reddit said it reported net income of $18.5 million — its first profit in two years — in the October-December quarter on revenue of $249.8 million.

  Given that Reddit granting exclusive indexing to Google happened at about the same time, I would assume that that deal includes that, but maybe it’s separate.

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  • Vanth@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If we do end up at a point without search engines, where AI does the search and summarizes an answer, what do you think their level of ability to tie back to source material will be?

      I haven’t used the text-based search queries myself; I’ve used LLM software, but not for this, so I don’t know what the current situation is like. My understanding is that current approach doesn’t really permit for it. And there are two issues with that:

      • There isn’t a direct link between one source and what’s being generated; the model isn’t really structured so as to retain this.

      • Many different sources probably contribute to the answer.

      All information contributes a little bit to the probability of the next word that the thing is spitting out. It’s not that the software rapidly looks through all pages out there and then finds a given single reputable source that could then cite, the way a human might. That is, you aren’t searching an enormous database when the query comes in, but repeatedly making use of a prediction that the next word in the correct response is a given word, and that probability is derived from many different cases. Maybe tens of thousands of people have made posts on a given subject; the response isn’t just a quote from one, and the generated text may appear in none of them.

      It might be possible to basically run a traditional search for a generated response to find an example of that text, if it amounts to a quote (which it may not!)

      And if Google produces some kind of “reliability score” for a given piece of material and weights the material in the training set by that (which I will guess that if they don’t now, they will), they could maybe use the reliability score to try to rank various sources when doing that backwards search.

      But there’s no guarantee that that will succeed, because they’re ultimately synthesizing the response, not just quoting it, and because it can come from many sources. There may potentially be no one source that says what Google is handing back.

      It’s possible that there will be other methods than the present ones used for generating responses in the future, and those could have very different characteristics. Like, I would not be surprised, if this takes off, if the resulting system ten years down the road is considerably more complex than what is presently being done.

      There’s been some discussion about developing systems that do permit for this, and I believe that if you want to read up on it, the term used is “attributability”, but I have not been reading research on it.

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    • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      have you tried perplexity? it’s probably the best ai search engine right now although it still misunderstands context sometimes. it’s pretty good at citing its sources though

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• GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  At least on some smaller subs, there seems to be a suspicious amount of brand new accounts asking one question to get human answers.
  It would not surprise me if reddit, or some other service, are seeding to get more LLM-able content. Of course, this might backfire if people start giving stupid answers to eff up the data.

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  • roguetrick@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If I’m not mistaken, Reddit has actual staff centered around asking questions to get engagement in small communities. Not so much for LLM reasons but to actually grow those communities (and thus edge out competition).

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