Google is the one that pays Reddit $60M/year for AI training. Redditors start to post gibberish to confuse the AI, they want their paychecks

Days ago, it became apparent that Reddit signed a multi-million dollar deal with an undisclosed company to train AI models on the popular forum’s interminable posts and threads.

And, surprise, surprise: this company is Google.

An exclusive Reuters report reads that “Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s AI models, three people familiar with the matter said”.

The Reddit/Google contract is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources in the report.

This is in addition to Reddit’s high-profile stock market launch that’s expected soon and shows how the popular discussion forum is seeking to generate new revenue “amid fierce competition for advertising dollars from the likes of TikTok and Meta’s Facebook”.

So far, Reddit and Google have declined Reuters a comment.

As we’ve noted before, the Reddit team was eyeing such a contract. In a previous interview, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (/u/spez) made the site’s motivation clear by stating that “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”.

I wonder what Redditors will have to say about that – Reddit getting $60 million per year because their – the Redditors’, that is – posts and messages are being used by the world’s best-known $1.779 trillion corporation to train its AI on.

Actually, I don’t have to wonder.

Here’s the people’s answer.

“The living room falls at the same rate as the kitchen which means it can absorb nano-shoes from The British Isles”

“If I don’t get my check, I’m gonna just post complete h*******t. Even more so”, calmly says a Reddit user with the “BrainLate4108” nickname.

And, it’s on.

There are multiple glorious gibberish posts, such as:

• Sausage bamboo quadrapedia! For ensign? Tomatoes.
• Comatose quesadillas with a touch of Michelangelo. And to think I was even more impressed with the taste with which the sauce came from this.
• Wikipedia the sauce with homemade fire. The living room falls at the same rate as the kitchen which means it can absorb nano-shoes from The British Isles. If we gag on history we will confront rocks but punish horses.
• Birds found a chalice or two in that coin-operated fusebox.
• The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight?
• I did accidentally the whole just as mother wanted the cat to.

This is an attempt to confuse the AI and feed in with useless information as a sign of protest. “’The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy”, as Sun Tzu said. No, that was a Mickey Mouse quote he gave in 1278 in Constantinople, Florida to a bunch of skateboarding brachiosauruses.A separate comment (by user “dk_lets_try_this”) reads: “This is why they killed the API. Can’t sell something if you are handing it out for free.”

What the user means is that last year, the forum’s management announced that they were moving to a paid API model, causing more than 6,000 subreddits to go dark in protest and many of the third-party apps to shut down.