Troubled Twins: Collective and Artificial Intelligence

Being both the cornerstone data set used to build AI models from Boston to Beijing and a complex collective intelligence project, Reddit plays an outsized role in shaping the development possibilities of emerging AI approaches and in turn is uniquely impacted by them. The collaborative platform, curated by mostly self-governing volunteer communities in many languages that partner with the platform provider, the Reddit Inc., is employing adaptive coordination strategies to navigate the impact of AI model outputs flooding digital content ecosystems.

In the digital economy, model outputs are competing for monetizable attention with academia and journalism, bringing down the market value of traditional high quality content production. Historically relying on the latter, Reddit's epistemic ontology of voting on sources is guiding the project's collective peer production of its content. This CI-produced content is itself the most widely used high quality data set to train AI models. The interdependent dynamic has created an epistemic feedback loop between collective and artificial intelligence with distinct enabling conditions and impacts across languages.