Reddit sues to block Perplexity from scraping Google search results
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Perplexity: "we don't train the plagiarism engine we use ourselves, so using it is perfectly legal, right?" (...at least the LLM told us it was.)
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I can't believe I agree with Reddit on this. But in the pursuit of profits above all other considerations, I guess sometimes when two bad things fight, it's a good thing.
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Wtf, sounds like Google may have a case against them for unauthorized access, but how does Reddit have a case if the data is coming from google(and appears to be public?), a partner Reddit gives access to. Or maybe reddit would have a case against google for letting these bad actors get to the data but that seems like a stretch as well. Reddit just butthurt that someone found away around their licensing extortion plans? Last time I used reddit was june 12 2023. I lurk (no account) on lemmy (boost android app) and discuit these days.
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If I understand this correctly, the business model of Perplexity is to provide search results by searching on Google and summarizing the results?
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I don't much care for the AI monetization of comments and use generated content on platforms like reddit or by ...ahem ...other associated Conde Nast properties.
but...
These companies are clearly full of it with excuses like what they are putting forward. Claiming it is public data is not going to get them anywhere, it clearly ain't. I don't expect anyone to be particularly sympathetic to Perplexities case that they have no part in this simply because they were not directly engaging in the scraping. And then to act surprised that reddit proceeded to litigation and didn't first approach any of them when they got caught, is more bs. If I caught someone red handed, walking past my no trespassing sign to snap a photo of my art for the 18th time so they could sell it on etsy or something, I certainly wouldn't be talking it out with them before calling the cops. Saying its okay because its publicly visible in my front yard aint gonna cut it either.
but...
These companies are clearly full of it with excuses like what they are putting forward. Claiming it is public data is not going to get them anywhere, it clearly ain't. I don't expect anyone to be particularly sympathetic to Perplexities case that they have no part in this simply because they were not directly engaging in the scraping. And then to act surprised that reddit proceeded to litigation and didn't first approach any of them when they got caught, is more bs. If I caught someone red handed, walking past my no trespassing sign to snap a photo of my art for the 18th time so they could sell it on etsy or something, I certainly wouldn't be talking it out with them before calling the cops. Saying its okay because its publicly visible in my front yard aint gonna cut it either.
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As much as I dislike AI scraping, it's kind of hard to be too sympathetic to reddit here. We're talking about public facing content that apparently doesn't even require you to visit Reddit to view,.. data that Reddit only cares about because they'd rather sell it off to companies instead. Data that isn't generated by Reddit as a company and is being sold off without any compensation given to the actual content creators. I don't see why I should be particularly enthused about Reddit's rent seeking here.
Though this article does a good job demonstrating how useless Perplexity's product seems to be. Reading the article I'm struggling to figure out what their service even is. Is it really just sending an API call to another LLM and a google search stapled together? I don't know why anyone would need a proprietary service for that.
Though this article does a good job demonstrating how useless Perplexity's product seems to be. Reading the article I'm struggling to figure out what their service even is. Is it really just sending an API call to another LLM and a google search stapled together? I don't know why anyone would need a proprietary service for that.
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It reminds me of the dot-com boom companies where their product was a "browser" that was just a skin wrapped around the IE web component.
The clever ones cashed out for millions before the bubble popped.
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Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up.
Redditors create content that Reddit sells to train Google's AI while Google is scraping Reddit to provide search results and further engage users with AI summaries. Perplexity scraped the results of the search results and summaries and used them to train its AI. Corporations win, creators lose.
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They improperly used Google to acquire data from Reddit to which they held no license. Two different claims.
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Since Trump and regime are all in on A.I and crypto investments , I mean corruption- you can bet your sweet ass he won’t go after them one bit. This is trumps America, America the corrupt.
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I mean, the CEO gives off major Elizabeth Holmes vibes... Is anyone really surprised?
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It's best not to think too hard about the "business models" of these companies.
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LOL, Reddit claims its reputation has been damaged!
Benito Mussolini - in the Piazzale Loreto - had a better reputation than Reddit…
Benito Mussolini - in the Piazzale Loreto - had a better reputation than Reddit…
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That’s an amusing stance for Perplexity. Both acknowledging that their entire product is entirely dependent on a free service Google provide, and claiming that Google is a “huge” competitor.
If my product was only viable as long as my huge competitor continued to allow me to abuse their free products, I wouldn’t be shouting it from the rooftops. People might start wondering what on earth my product actually did.
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I'm maybe not fully up to speed here but ... the salient difference would seem to be that you don't have to feed the cow whilst still getting the free milk.
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You are missing something. The AI slop companies (That includes OpenAI) prefer to sling all the shit they can find against the wall for training and then try and slap on guard rails after the fact in an attempt to stop their creation from being as racist, toxic and generally obnoxious as the data they trained it on.
Filtering what you feed your AI so that it is reliable, factual and sane is far far too hard for them you see
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Meanwhile, if I ask my friend Steve to google something for me, that is perfectly fine to do and Steve probably won't get sued. He may use my data inappropriately though.
Weird how 'on a computer' is suddenly 'as a computer'. Anyway, those are funny thoughts that don't apply.
Along the same lines others have noted, I am in awe that the users that created the content have no part in this story except to be the entire thing of value that give all of the other services and interested parties any reason to exist at all. So fucking weird.
I don't mean to knock the trove of valuable content on reddit when I say that I generally don't see value in reddit search results for the things I'm looking for lately. Maybe 50/50 if I'm feeling generous. There is an argument that reddit has contributed to longer times spent searching for answers for my use case.
I have no experience with Perplexity. Does anyone here have experience with it as a daily search tool?
Weird how 'on a computer' is suddenly 'as a computer'. Anyway, those are funny thoughts that don't apply.
Along the same lines others have noted, I am in awe that the users that created the content have no part in this story except to be the entire thing of value that give all of the other services and interested parties any reason to exist at all. So fucking weird.
I don't mean to knock the trove of valuable content on reddit when I say that I generally don't see value in reddit search results for the things I'm looking for lately. Maybe 50/50 if I'm feeling generous. There is an argument that reddit has contributed to longer times spent searching for answers for my use case.
I have no experience with Perplexity. Does anyone here have experience with it as a daily search tool?
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Sadly, the AI companies don't really care about reliability, or they would scrape Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg and call it good. They're operating on the theory that the more human-produced content they have, the more plausibly human their models' output will be. If they get enough, their models will understand the world and be competent office workers.
Until recently, most Reddit posts were written by humans. Racists, flat-earthers, shit-posters, it didn't matter; it was all "human-generated content." As the rest of the Web was increasingly flooded by AI slop, sources of actual human writing became increasingly valuable.
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Since google got consistently worse over the course of several years.
It's wild to say this but if you search for something on reddit you're getting an actual person's opinion/experience. But it won't be an ad. Or ai. Or a paid advertisement masquerading as a review. It'll just be handful of people discussing something. And somehow this may be the best result you can get: just some guy's opinion.
I put in a garden drip irrigation system this summer. It sucks but reddit was by far the best resource for that.
I used to do youtube for a lot of instructional/informational stuff but that has gotten massively worse since shorts took off.
So perhaps the best way I can explain it is that reddit has stayed (mostly) the same while the rest of the internet has declined rapidly. They didn't become more trustworthy they just became the least-untrustworthy by default?
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My ISP has given me free access to Perplexity Pro. I'm not a maven of search engines nor of composing prompts for LLMs in general. I've found Perplexity useful for some more complicated searches/summaries. For example:
"Provide a bibliography of open sources in English or French that explore the distinction that Foucault makes between subjectivity and individuality."
"Using https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne/ and other sources suggest an order for reading the essays in Book 3 of Montaigne's Essays in a thematic way. Answer in Markdown format."
For me, at least, Perplexity generated replies and actual sources that I would have had a lot of difficulty coming up with myself and saved me the time that a close reading of the lengthy entry in the SEP would have consumed.
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1) Human generated content is valuable even if it's not provided by experts. "What office chair should I get?" "Which mixer will best handle 5 pounds of flour?" "Does what this handyman installed under my sink pass the sniff test?" "What hotel should I stay at in Boston?" "What's the best way to run a 57" Samsung monitor with an M4 Mac?" is all valuable information to find out when written by people. Some of those people will be wrong, but this is classic "wisdom of the crowds" stuff that hearkens back to earlier days of the internet when there were a lot more subject specific forums.
2) Building on 1, forums in many places have shut down over the last decade, and Reddit has become the home for a lot of information- or at least, a lot of publicly searchable information (since the alternative for specialized communities often rests in Discord or other services not publicly searchable).
3) There are some subreddits that are actually really good. See, for example, AskHistorians, AskElectricians, etc. Some of the information is dubious, but many of these places are full of "I live and breathe this stuff and I just want to comment on the stuff that I know" types of folks. Reddit has a poor reputation both because there are a certain number of folks who know little and say much posting and because of certainly poorly or maliciously moderated subreddits. But it can also be incredibly useful; I frequently use Google searches specifying reddit as the site simply because I know that I'm likely to run into human generated content that actually has answered questions other people had that I now have, or that's at least related to my question.
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Every one of these parties is a blood-sucking parasite.
Donate to Wikipedia. They only want ~$3.
Donate to Wikipedia. They only want ~$3.
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Reddit isn't the government. So many American's don't understand their own constitution...
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It's an ecosystem: Google steers you to Reddit, you learn and post back to Reddit, Google uses your answer to steer others to Reddit.
Meanwhile all the old mom and pop websites like "Moist Joe's drip irrigation forum" wither on the vine. It's the Wal-Martization of the open internet.
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It's better than using X to train MachaHiitler (Grok)
Faint praise I know, and sometimes dead is better too.
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The Data Wars begun they have.
Interesting to note no one is concerned about the actual people generating the useful data; the John and Jane Doe who took the time to educate themselves, become subject matter experts, and interact with other people on Reddit. God forbid they will see a dime out of this bonanza.
Interesting to note no one is concerned about the actual people generating the useful data; the John and Jane Doe who took the time to educate themselves, become subject matter experts, and interact with other people on Reddit. God forbid they will see a dime out of this bonanza.
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Examples like this make it difficult for me to say 'AI tools should go away'. I don't think the clever tricks to making the tools sound cool are actually artificial intelligence, but I do see value in the ability to parse copious amounts of data in a short amount of time, with some understanding of the context to my queries, and the logical next steps after the first query. I feel like we're finally getting good digital assistants, and all we had to do was burn down the planet.
Thanks for sharing the experience as well as the topic you were looking into.
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Reddit don't own our content.
They have a perpetual license to republish it, sell it and use it however they want, but they don't own the content.
I don't see how they can sue someone else for stealing it. The people who own the content is us, we have provided them a non-exclusive irrevocable license to use it. But I don't see how they have standing to claim that someone else can steal it.
Since even by their terms, they don't own it. They simply have a license to it.
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You said it best.
I can only echo - it's so weird, all these firms, every single one, makes money by organizing content made by other people. And then trying to pretend like it's "their" content.
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