Our unhinged restaurant reviews have become a hot commodity for AI companies.
Driving the news: Yelp has struck a licensing deal with OpenAI to have its reviews, photos, and recommendations embedded in ChatGPT, per Axios. The agreement allows Yelp to pursue similar deals with other AI companies.
Why it matters: Over half of new articles on the internet are now AI-generated. That’s made high-quality data from platforms like Yelp and Reddit — where real people make recommendations — increasingly scarce and valuable to AI companies.
A recent National Bank study found that nearly 40% of Canadians use an AI chatbot to guide their purchasing decisions, including where to eat or go on vacation.
Yes, but: The licensing deal is a risk for Yelp. With unfettered access to its content, ChatGPT could end up poaching a lot of the traffic and engagement that makes Yelp’s data valuable in the first place. Even though it's making millions to license its content, Reddit has been hurt by this exact dynamic.
Since Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly in search results, users aren’t clicking through to Reddit as frequently, and the company is considering ending its licensing deal with Google.
Zoom out: The more we talk to chatbots instead of each other, the less high-quality data we generate to train them. A Stanford report found that human-generated data for AI training could be depleted within the next six years, with AI researchers publicly claiming the pool of high-quality human text and web data has already been exhausted.—LA
