Reddit was one of the first major platforms to sell access to its wealth of (user-generated) content to AI companies looking for training data. It also was, for a long while, one of the most-cited sources to appear in AI-generated responses. So it’s pretty jarring to see the company’s citation rate plummet to near-zero on ChatGPT, per PromptWatch data, all while Reddit ramps up its own embrace of AI—including turning posts into podcasts.
The precipitous decline of Reddit as a primary source has come suddenly, it seems. Up until August 8, Reddit regularly appeared in responses generated by ChatGPT, showing up in as many as 4.5% of all outputs. But earlier this month, OpenAI changed how it pulls in information to respond to inputs.
According to PromptWatch, the company started using a “site:operator” when performing searches. That means it no longer pulls from the open web as a starting point and instead goes to specific sites to pull information. The result has been quite bad for Reddit, which now is cited in about 0.5% of all responses. That might not be the worst thing, given how bad AI models are at sifting out bad information. Notoriously, a Reddit post was the reason that Google’s AI-powered search once told someone to use glue to get cheese to stay on pizza.
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for more information regarding the change but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
While Reddit is apparently no longer viewed as a top authority in the eyes of AI, the company is certainly not shying away from the embrace of the technology. Per a report from The Verge, Reddit has started experimenting with turning posts and comments into short videos and podcasts using AI. For instance, an eight-year-old post in r/boardgames asking “What are some good road trip games for adults?” which generated more than 100 responses, can now be viewed as an AI-generated video that provides voices for the initial post and some of the top responses.
The post now features a slider toggle that lets you choose between “Read” for the original text-based version and “Play” for the new-AI generated version. It appears to be a part of a new push from the company, teased during a recent earnings report, to allow people to “listen to posts” in the background, in the same way that people might just listen to a YouTube video without actively watching it.
Reddit used to host a human-made podcast, called Upvoted, that featured stories pulled directly from its communities. Now it’s stripping the human part out and just making people’s posts into AI slop meant to keep people passively engaged, probably so they can sell ads alongside that content. We used to be a proper country.
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