Google’s AI Just Got a Massive Boost Thanks to Reddit
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The AI chatbot wars are on, and Google just added a shiny new weapon to its arsenal. The search engine announced on February 22 a $60M deal with Reddit, in which Google will be allowed to train its artificial intelligence models on Reddit posts. As OpenAI’s ChatGPT still dominates, that leaves other companies jockeying for position, each striving to find an edge in the arena. This new deal may be Google’s.
Google hasn’t been having a great time of it lately, PR-wise. Reports have been coming out that say the company’s search results are getting worse, a claim that’s pretty widespread among users. And in recent scandals, Google has had to apologize for its Gemini AI tool creating historically inaccurate images that are offensive, like depicting Nazis as people of color. As such the company has had to pause the image generator function as they try to fix the problem. While Google has become ubiquitous in our tech-dominated world — you would never tell someone to “Bing” an answer, you say to “Google it” — these kinds of both long-term and short term issues add up, ultimately leading to the question: is it time to explore using other search engines? Is this the beginning of the end of Google’s dominance?
Well, not if Google can help it. It’s not a leap to say that AI chatbots and search engines are likely to become inextricable from each other before long, and Google’s deal with Reddit could hit a number of birds with one stone. For one thing, the obvious. These AI models need material to be trained on, which is something that’s becoming increasingly contentious in a legal sense, as OpenAI has been sued by famous authors, like George R.R. Martin, and the New York Times for training ChatGPT on copyrighted material. This Reddit deal bypasses such complications while giving Google access to a huge amount of human-written material, which will help its chatbot learn world knowledge and how to answer questions in a more conversational way.
Perhaps just as exciting, however, is that this will help Google showcase Reddit material, making it easier for users to access the vast amount of information contained by the discussion forums. If Google is concerned that users aren’t able to find results that are helpful to them as easily as they used to, this could be at least a beginning to remedying that. I know I personally have relied on Reddit forums to glean information about something I can’t find the answer to in mainstream media (sometimes these are dumb things, like did a certain dating app change what preferences it allows you to have?), but as a person who finds Reddit confusing, having that information funneled to me will make a huge difference.
Google has, correctly, pointed out that many people use the combination of Google and Reddit to “find product recommendations, travel advice, and much more.” Indeed, this seems to be the function Reddit is most excited about as they claim their new partnership with Google will “make it easier to discover and access the communities and conversations people are looking for on Reddit.”
So what does this mean for marketers? (After all, this is a marketing blog.) As we in the marketing industry ponder what the future of search engine optimization (SEO) will look like, and what Google’s place in it will be, this provides a whole new facet to consider. Having buzz about your product on Reddit can take on a new emphasis as Google users are more likely to have that buzz featured for them. As for the aforementioned AI wars? Well, like I said, AI chatbots and search engines are only going to become more interconnected with time. For all we know, who has the best AI could determine who has the best — and most used — search engine. As Google battles to maintain their supremacy in the search world, this Reddit deal could give them the edge they’re looking for.
