OpenAI’s ChatGPT will have to comply with tougher EU rules such as removing illegal content or face potential fines, the European Commission said on Monday, as Brussels grapples with how its existing digital regulation applies to rapidly evolving AI services.

The Commission said the chatbot, social media forum Reddit, and gaming platform Roblox would be classified as so-called very large online platforms under the EU Digital Services Act, its landmark online safety regime.

The designation means all three services will face additional obligations such as removing illegal content and protecting the privacy and security of minors and could face fines of up to 6 percent of their global revenue if they fail to comply.

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Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. But when it comes to AI slop and hateful content threatening the safety and value of social media platforms, adding more fire—in this case, more AI—can make the problem worse.

At its best, social media can be a haven for people who want to share their experiences and knowledge. It gets closest to this ideal when users contribute authentic, valuable content, whether that’s a uniquely thoughtful blog post or a helpful video on how to build a PC. Relying primarily on AI tools to preserve that authenticity misses what makes social media worthwhile in the first place: the people behind it.

Erroneous erasures

In April, a Slack channel for moderators of the r/AskHistorians Reddit community was usually busy. The channel, which automatically receives links to modmail messages, was flooded with alerts after dozens of comments and posts dating back 10 years were automatically removed from the subreddit.

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Old.reddit.com’s days appear to be numbered.

Reddit has strayed from saying that it will shutter the website, which many long-time Redditors prefer for its layout, navigation, and fewer feed recommendations.

In a blog post today, Reddit made a vague statement about upcoming “changes” to Old Reddit:

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Like any company, Reddit reports quarterly earnings, and its CEO, Steve Huffman, addresses investors during those reports. It's not always about just sharing numbers, though: This quarter, Huffman took the opportunity to voice concerns and criticisms about Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically summarizes search results on most user queries.

First, there was a letter to investors, wherein Huffman spun his narrative about Reddit's value proposition and general strategic direction amid the proliferation of AI tools.

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On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results.

In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.

Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent the scraping of protected content. Google told Ars that it planned to amend its complaint to keep its lawsuit alive, but SerpApi told Ars that Google and Reddit were both trying to “use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.”

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After a big court loss last week, Google has confirmed that it won’t give up its fight to block AI bots from scraping its search results. And Reddit is weirdly along for the ride.

Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December. The search giant accused the web scraper of circumventing its anti-scraping technology and then selling content scraped from Google search results through an unauthorized “Google Search API” software service.

According to Google, the anti-scraping tech was in place to protect copyrighted content in search results. Allegedly, SerpApi’s circumvention threatened to disrupt Google’s relationships with rights holders, including some who license content to Google to appear in so-called “knowledge panels” that are displayed in some search results for well-known people or entities.

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Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.

The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”

The Reddit employee wrote:

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