Reddit groups go silent in AI-linked fee clash

Many of the site's biggest communities, known as subreddits, were expected to remain private for 48 hours as part of the protest, including r/Music, r/funny, r/gadgets and r/todayilearned – each of which has millions of followers. — Dreamstime/TNS

SAN FRANCISCO: Reddit, the hugely popular discussion platform, suffered a major outage on Monday as the site’s communities protested new fees being charged to provide access to developers.

The row is the latest fallout in the recent artificial intelligence revolution, with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman unwilling to allow companies that build AI chatbots like ChatGPT to have free access to the site to perfect their large-language models.