Could Reddit's data be "poisoned" to prevent its use in training AI?

You raise an interesting bundt pan.

So if you were to start using AI to generate comments and posts on Reddit, their database would be less useful for training AI and therefore the company wouldn't be able to sell it for that purpose.

It feels like Reddit was already using bots to make posts after they killed 3rd party apps. It's been pointed out a lot here how so many comment chains on the site these days make no sense unless they are AI/bots.

In case you didn’t know, you can’t train an AI on content generated by another AI because it causes distortion that reduces the quality of the output.

This is incorrect in the general case. You can run into problems if you do it incorrectly or in a naive manner. But this is stuff that the professionals have figured out months or years ago already. A lot of the better AIs these days are trained on "synthetic data", which is data that's been generated by other AIs.

I've seen a lot of people fall for wishful thinking on this subject. They don't like AI for whatever reason, they hear some news article that says something that sounds like "AI won't work because of problem X", and so they grab hold of that. "Model collapse" is one of those things, it's not really a problem that serious researchers consider insurmountable.

If you don't want Reddit to use your posts to train AI then don't post on Reddit. If you already did post on Reddit, it's too late, you already gave them your content. Bear this in mind next time you join a social media site, I guess.

With the amount of bot generated content on Reddit already that data can't be of much value

Redact. The free version replaces your posts and comments with gibberish.

There's something you're missing about this, and that's how low quality the human generated content is on that site. The default subs are utter dumpster fires, with the top few comments typically being pop culture references being yelled into the ether, followed by unhinged rants, nutty takes, and assorted nonsense, all with poor spelling, grammar, and often the entirely wrong word used.

Flooding the place with AI content would be an improvement.

No, because the upvote ratio on posts and comments will be used to signal higher quality content.

It would take considerable effort and coordination to generate low quality content and give it an upvote history that isn't obviously suspicious and do that for enough content that it actually matters to the training.

Even if you could accomplish that, you can't backdate this activity, so they could simply filter out posts and comments after a recent date and still have an enormous amount of data to train.

It seems this assumes that Reddit cares about the quality of the data, but as long as they can sell it I doubt they care.

Frankly, reddit is so overrun with bots and nazis that it's already a superfund site.

I don't think that you can prevent Reddit data from being used for AI training, but you could reduce its value. Based on that, I'd probably

1. Generate low quality text that machines would have a hard time sorting out.
2. Replace your current Reddit content with said gibberish.

I'm saying this based on the following:

• I don't think that Reddit has any sort of complex content versioning system; at most, I think that it keeps your deleted posts/comments.
• Odds are that the data is filtered before being used for "training", and both user karma + content score play a role on that. As such, it would be pointless to add nonsense content that humans will downvote.

Funnily enough, AI might be a good way to generate this poisoning data against AI. For example I asked Gemini "Generate three paragraphs of nonsense text, containing three sentences each.", and here's the output

You could tweak the prompt to get something even more nonsense or even more passable, but you get the idea.

"It's fascinating yet concerning to see Reddit's move to sell its content for training AI models. This feels like a plot twist in a 'Black Mirror' episode, making us wonder if we're heading towards a 'Brave New World' or just caught in the 'Net' of progress. While the potential to enhance AI's grasp of human banter is immense, it also opens a Pandora's box of privacy and ethical issues. It's a byte-sized dilemma in a world hungry for data, urging us for a transparent dialogue to ensure we don't scroll past our own rights. Perhaps, in a twist of fate, it's humanity's destiny to carve a future where we coexist with, if not be guided by, the very machines we've created."

Yes of course you could poison it. The thing is, Reddit leaders don't care. They want to inflate the price as much as possible, get as much money from it, and then bail when the time is right.

Many downstream customers also don't care. They're riding the AI bubble to get richer, not because they actually care about high-quality products. Of course there is some cool legitimate AI work and research, as we have all seen, but the expensive decisions are being made based on expected short-run profit.

For extreme cases = maybe something like this;

It is not („actual code or anything“) in fact.It is just random formatting;

Though_something_like-this-might-also_work.png

.But honestly‘ just leaving some- random pieces here@ and there‘ is probably enough to be a head‘ache .

You can train AI models on AI generated content though. AI collapse only occurs if you train it on bad AI generated content. Bots and people talking gibberish are just as bad for training an AI model. But there are ways to filter that from the training data. Such as language analysis. They will also most likely filter out any lowly upvoted comments, or those edited a long time since their original post date.

And if you start posting now, any sufficiently good AI generated material, which other humans will like and upvote, will not be bad for the model.

They probably want you to edit your comments to poison them.

They probably are using AI bots to make astroturf posts already.

Imagine how much it’s worth to Google to train an AI to recognize other AI generated posts. Imagine how much it’s worth to Google to have a training set of “poisoned” data (and to able to compare it to the original post, which they can do since reddit saves your edits on the backend). Not to mention training on genuine reaction by users to AI posts, to obvious poisoning. They’ll be able to use that to train their own AI to not be defeated by these issues.

I don’t know what should be done but I feel like trying to defeat the AI training actually plays right into their hands.

In the year 3000: we have hyper intelligent AI, but it's limited to knowledge from 2022.

You can try something like what's explained here, maybe? https://youtu.be/WO2X3oZEJOA

Anonymous could wipe the servers.

I'm buying Reddit when it's traded

I think people are going a bit overboard with the reddit hate. I used the site for over a decades, learned a lot and had a lot of laughts and fun and gripes. To want to "burn it down" now because of api and ai stuff is understandable, but seems just vindictive. What public good is supposed to be achieved with this?