AI Rules? Characterizing Reddit Community Policies Towards AI-Generated Content

2024-10-15

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates how Reddit communities respond to governance challenges posed by AI-generated content. Method: Leveraging a longitudinal crawl and manual annotation of over 300,000 subreddit rules, we construct the first community-level taxonomy for AI-content governance—integrating established HCI frameworks with a novel, empirically grounded classification scheme—and apply statistical analysis and trend modeling. Results: We find that the number of subreddits adopting AI-specific rules doubled within one year; such rules are heavily concentrated in large, art- or celebrity-focused communities, while social-support subreddits remain nearly absent; thematic analysis reveals pronounced heterogeneity, with dominant concerns centering on content quality and authenticity. This work provides the first systematic characterization of community-level adoption dynamics, structural inequities, and normative evolution in AI-content governance—and publicly releases the complete dataset to support reproducible research.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

How are Reddit communities responding to AI-generated content? We explored this question through a large-scale analysis of subreddit community rules and their change over time. We collected the metadata and community rules for over $300,000$ public subreddits and measured the prevalence of rules governing AI. We labeled subreddits and AI rules according to existing taxonomies from the HCI literature and a new taxonomy we developed specific to AI rules. While rules about AI are still relatively uncommon, the number of subreddits with these rules more than doubled over the course of a year. AI rules are more common in larger subreddits and communities focused on art or celebrity topics, and less common in those focused on social support. These rules often focus on AI images and evoke, as justification, concerns about quality and authenticity. Overall, our findings illustrate the emergence of varied concerns about AI, in different community contexts. Platform designers and HCI researchers should heed these concerns if they hope to encourage community self-determination in the age of generative AI. We make our datasets public to enable future large-scale studies of community self-governance.

Problem

• Analyzing Reddit community rules on AI-generated content.
• Measuring prevalence and changes in AI-related subreddit rules.
• Identifying concerns about AI quality and authenticity in communities.

Innovation

• Large-scale analysis of subreddit community rules
• Development of a new taxonomy for AI rules
• Public dataset for future governance studies