Reddit signs AI content licensing deal

It's been reported by Bloomberg that Reddit has shared the news with prospective investors ahead of its IPO. The deal is said to be worth about $60 million per year. There is no mention of the identity of the AI ​​company partnering with Reddit or how long the contract lasts.

A source told Bloomberg that Reddit will generate about $800 million in revenue in 2023, up about 20 percent from last year. Adding in an extra $60 million in annual revenue would help Reddit. As it relates to bringing in investors, Bloomberg previously reported that Reddit has been guided to a valuation of at least $5 billion in an IPO, which could happen as early as March 2024.

Reddit has recently made other controversial decisions, such as deleting years of private chat records and messages from user accounts. The platform also implemented a new automatic moderation feature and removed the option for users to turn off personalized advertising. This provoked further dissatisfaction among users.

A recently reported deal to sell Reddit's data for AI training may spark even more backlash from users. As the debate over the ethics of using public data, art, and other human-generated content to train AI systems continues to intensify across industries and platforms,

Reddit's AI content manipulation isn't the first, and it won't be the last. At the end of last year OpenAI has signed a contract with German media company Axel Springer SE to train models. Using its content, Bloomberg at the time said the deal was worth tens of millions of dollars. Axel Springer SE is responsible for several high-profile publications, including Business Insider and Politico.