After years of financial struggles, Reddit is cashing in with AI. With AI companies increasingly hungry for large troves of user data, Reddit has jumped on the bandwagon with its decision to sell its large library of user-generated content — a choice that has boosted its revenue and made it a hot stock for investors, The Wall Street Journal writes.

What’s so great about Reddit’s data? The platform is full of text-heavy posts, comments, and discussions that are organized by topic and whose pseudonymity often prompts much more candid answers than can be found on other areas of the internet. This kind of data is a veritable gold mine for AI companies, who usually rely on human interaction to make their models sound natural and conversational. On top of that, Reddit has a unique voting system that allows users, and now AI, to determine what counts as a quality post or not — allowing AI models to further refine their sense of human tastes.

The impact: Reddit’s data-licensing revenue grew from USD 12.3 mn to USD 81.6 mn during the first nine months of this year, following the company’s shift toward charging AI companies for access. While this is still a small sum compared to its core advertising sales, the area’s significant growth has helped more than double the company’s stock price.

The platform is changing in ways that users may not like. Reddit has unveiled its AI-powered search and answer tool, Reddit Answers, using models from OpenAI and Google — showing that the company is embracing the tech that made its data so valuable. But, as the company dives deeper into AI, it could start to feel less like the Reddit users know and love — and more like all the other platforms that use algorithms to show AI-generated and narrowly user-specific content.

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