Reddit fighting to keep humans at the heart of its platform, chief executive says

Reddit wants to stay distinctly human, its chief executive, Steve Huffman, told the Financial Times.

“It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity,” he told FT.

According to the media outlet, businesses are migrating to Reddit en masse as the platform becomes an increasingly important source for large language models (LLMs). Many brands are thinking about opening a business account on Reddit.

However, Huffman says the platform will crack down on AI-generated content by implementing strict verification checks.

That doesn’t mean redditors will be required to post under their real name. However, according to FT, Reddit is considering using the eyeball-scanning technology from Sam Altman’s Worldcoin venture, World ID, to verify users.

“Human verification is top of mind for us right now. Over the rest of this year, we’ll be evolving that – it’s a need on the internet broadly,” Huffman said.

While Reddit is fighting artificial users on its platform, it is also embracing the technology itself. For example, the social media platform recently announced Reddit Community Intelligence, trained on over 22 billion posts and comments to help businesses sell you more stuff.