Aside from making it clear that users are just krill on which to feed the chatbots; Huffman’s attitude suggests a willingness to burn things down in a fit of aggrieved entitlement; but much less sense of having a solution to the problem he’s upset about.
Given that any judgement to the effect that bots are derivative works or otherwise require some level of permission from the copyright holders of the training corpus would be apocalyptic for them; the botherds have been very, very, busily just not asking permission and hoping that they’ll be too disruptive to need forgiveness(along with being somewhat cagey about exactly what gets tossed into the training trough); so it’s absolute lunacy to expect that reddit will be able to dictate an access price any higher than the cost of just quietly scraping in what’s probably a ToS violation but what are you going to do about it; and that’s for current and future activity; years of past activity are already known to be out in the wild and unlikely to become less available over time.
He’s correct that the data has value; crass in his belief that because it has value he deserves to capture all the value; but delusional in his approach: presumably because the people he wants lining up and shoving that sweet 'Open’AI cash down his throat are harder targets he has instead focused fire on the much more cooperative, and actually value-adding, targets.
It’s like the story about the drunk searching for his car keys under a streetlight because that’s where the light is; except that the drunk punches you and screams “I’m not in the business of giving away my car keys!” in order to demonstrate his commitment to the search process.
