Reddit warned AI companies against using data from its platform for commercial purposes without permission.

According to Reddit COO Jen Wong, AI firms should not scrape data on the company’s platform use without consent. She went on to say that, given the AI industry's appetite for data to train its models, Reddit believes there is commercial value which can be unlocked through licensing.

Wong’s intervention highlighted broader concerns about the use and misuse of data for commercial purposes, and raised ethical questions about the consent of platform users, who typically are unaware that their data is made available to third-parties on a commercial basis and is scraped by third-parties to train their models.

The AI industry is known to widely use data scraping to train its models. ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and other products are subject to numerous class-action lawsuits relating to alleged data theft and copyright abuse.