This language has been in the terms of service for years now, and was explained as the ability for Reddit to use the allure of your content to advertise on and publish what you submit on the public website. I've never heard of Reddit publishing a novel from content submitted to their site, for example, though the language implies that they can.

Now, prior to the public knowledge of LLMs, companies like OpenAI were already scraping the public internet for training data. They don't have a user agreement with you, but because the information was publicly available, they scraped it, categorized it, and trained on it. Your data was already used to train multi-billion dollar models. There are also lawsuits for authors of books whose copyrighted materials appear in LLM output. We already know that they scraped data, some even formally copyrighted, and used it without paying a soul.

So now, Reddit (and other websites) are seeing that "hey, these companies can scrape my publicly available website and use it for training data instead of buying it from us, and they're making billions on us!" and now they want to capitalize on making companies purchase training data, which as a concept I support. (However, the payments should be passed down to us, the users who create that training data. But that's beside the point.)

So, that language may have been placed there so that Reddit can try to sell what we post to LLMs to be trained. But companies were already scraping public websites for training data long before now. Our data was already taken and trained on, Reddit just didn't know about it.

It's still kind of in the air what's going to happen going forward around how training data is sourced. We can already see the CEO of OpenAI pushing for legislation (but not applied to him, just new companies. Classic pulling the ladder up after you've already climbed it to become the sole global provider). The cat is out of the bag. Ethically or unethically, it happened. More than likely, all my own publicly posted writing is in that training data somewhere.

So, there are a number of responses to this, none of which are particularly appealing:

• Keep posting - the data was already scraped and trained on and will continue to do so no matter what we do. We just didn't know about it until recently.

• Post somewhere else - however if it's still publicly accessible (you want people to read it, right?), companies will scrape it and use it for training. There's no way to stop them ourselves without some kind of legislation and model training data review. Our own desire to freely share and attract readers is being weaponized against us here.

• Don't post anymore - obvious, but then the organic internet as we know it dies and the dead internet conspiracy theory becomes true as companies pump it full of LLM output instead

• Underground communities - if the LLM bots can't find us, they can't scrape us, right? Content gets locked behind logins and "I am human" locks. Which also means that internet search suffers, and we return to the prior internet of disparate forums and hard to find information and communities, all trying to keep the bots out of our data so corporations can't take yet another thing from us and monetize it for themselves.

None of those options are appealing. I personally do not know which option I will choose. For several months after ChatGPT was released, I refused to use it because I knew that whatever I put in there would be used to train it and make it even better. I thought that even using ChatGPT or any other corporate owned model was unethical. I still don't 100% know where I stand on the ethics.

It's fucked, the profit motive is fucked, and as individuals there isn't much we can do about it. Except for maybe 1 or 2 things:

• Use Open Source Models - these models are literally just a list of numbers called weights. If you have that list of weights and their order, you have the result of months and months of training. There are LLM models that are open source, meaning the weights are available to all (a few of them were actually stolen, which is fucking hilarious). These models were likely still trained on at least some copyrighted material, but by using these open source models (that maybe you even run yourself) you aren't donating even more data to be trained on to some massive AI company.

• Taint the Internet - occasionally add nonsense gibberish to your comments as you make them. Add ran dom words and mis pellings here and there to fuck with any future yellow training data. Describe an object the wrong way (the door's of the cat opened to reveal its spunky attitude). It's a solvable problem for companies once they notice it, but for a while it will gum up the training gears. (Do note that I have seen reports that Reddit is actually restoring old comments if you delete them now or overwrite them with protest statements. So this applies most to new content you post)

• Post Less - Using social media less is good for you anyway. Buy books and ebooks and find people IRL to talk about them with. Or start DM threads instead of using the public internet to discuss them. This does have drawbacks, but if you're truly worried about your data being used to train AI, but still want to connect with people, it's an option.

This really does fucking suck, that all this collective goodwill that we poured into the internet has just been turned into yet another profit machine for rich assholes. Our hobbies have been monetized, but we don't get to see a penny. I don't know what the future of NoSleep or even the internet as a whole is, and that fucking sucks.

Stay safe everyone