Reddit is fighting back against AI companies, and sports communities are key to the social media platform’s new lawsuit.
According to a report by Michael McCann of Sportico on Sunday, Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, which has been scraping posts authored by sports fans on the platform’s many popular sports-focused communities. Reddit is alleging that Anthropic, in scraping Reddit users’ content, has breached the social media site’s user agreement.
Per McCann, “Scraping Reddit content is portrayed as undermining Reddit’s obligations to its more than 100 million daily active unique users, including to protect their privacy. Reddit also contends Anthropic subverts its assurances to users that they control their expressions, including when deleting posts from public view.”
Reddit plays a key role in how digitally native sports fans consume the leagues and teams they love. Its sports communities are treasure troves of original content that could hypothetically prove hugely valuable to an AI language model, with no compensation to the original author.
In its filing Reddit claims its users “realize no benefits from the technology that they helped create.” An Anthropic spokesperson told the media, “we disagree with Reddit’s claims, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
It’s easy to see the value in an AI language model scraping sports subreddits. One has to imagine that, at a large scale, an AI model would be able to create a pretty good approximation for an online sports fan. That type of model would have numerous use cases for a wide-ranging group of stakeholders.
A team or league might be able to craft better messaging to its fanbase. Social media platforms might be able to post AI-created content that generates massive amounts of engagement. Of course, there are many negative use cases that are pretty easy to conjure up as well.
This lawsuit will also likely have implications outside of sports. Web scraping is prominent in internet communities well outside of sports, and a decision in this case could determine how online content is treated with regards to AI in the future.
