ikipedia and Reddit built their reputations on human-curated content. In the age of AI, both platforms are fighting to stay human-first.

On Wednesday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman emphasized the company’s mission to keep humans at the center, keeping Reddit a place where “people can talk to people.” In the Reddit post, Huffman included plans to prevent confusion between AI-written and human-written content.

The biggest change is that any accounts that use automation for allowed tasks, also known as “good-bots,” will be clearly labeled as “[App],” signalling to users that they are interacting with a machine instead of a human. Other changes include:

• Removal of bots: “Bad bots” or nefarious bot content will continue to be removed before users see it. At the moment, that's about 100K accounts per day, according to Huffman.
• Human verification: Reddit may occasionally ask users to verify they're human if content appears AI-generated, though this will be rare and focused on humanity rather than identity.
• Reporting: Users will be able to report suspicious content more easily.

Huffman also acknowledged that many people use AI to write, so Reddit isn’t curbing all AI-generated content. Overall, the comments were positive, with Reddit users celebrating that it would remain human first.

Reddit’s announcement followed a similar decree from Wikipedia, which last week enacted a new policy prohibiting the use of large language models to generate or rewrite article content. At most, editors may use it for copyediting or translation.

These changes come as demand for human-created content rises and the lines between authentic and machine-generated content become increasingly blurred.

Reddit's web traffic has continued its upward trajectory, with SimilarWeb data showing approximately 12% year-over-year growth in February. While there is no guarantee that prioritizing human content will maintain Reddit’s traffic, Adelle Kehoe, Director of Product Marketing at Similarweb told The Deep View that it can help the platform.

"While sites like Reddit and other forums have been successful in the traditional search landscape, we see the UGC aspect of their sites as their future-proof in the AI era,” said Kehoe. “It doesn't guarantee that they will always get as much traffic as in the past, but the one thing LLMs cannot do is create genuine human opinion and content.”

Wikipedia has not seen a similar boost as Reddit in the AI era, with traffic declining 8.8% year over year in February, according to Similiarweb data.

An emphasis on human content could help both platforms yield more immediate gains with readers, according to Joseph Levi, co-founder and CEO of Noise Media Group, who is exploring how to make brands stand out in the age of AI.“For Reddit and Wikipedia, cracking down on AI-generated content is ultimately about protecting trust, and trust is what underpins their value in both SEO and AI discovery,” said Levi. “Search engines and AI tools increasingly reward credible, distinctive, human-informed content, so preserving that standard is likely to strengthen their authority over time.”

Both companies currently have deals with AI companies to train on their data, making their positions on AI-generated content all the more nebulous. Wikimedia Enterprise has deals with Amazon, Meta, Google and Perplexity, and Reddit has a long-standing partnership with Google.

Keeping bots off platforms helps preserve their integrity, but there's an obvious paradox: Licensing that same data to AI companies to train their models only fuels the very problem they're trying to solve.

Our Deeper View

One of AI-generated content's biggest appeals is its ability to deliver exact answers in conversational language, feeding into a natural human desire to do less work, a temptation that's hard to resist. As a result, simply producing high-quality content is often no longer enough to compete, even as more people come to value human-first platforms. To systematically curb the spread of AI-generated content, meaningful limitations on what these models can train on are needed. A logical first step is for platforms to stop willingly surrendering their proprietary content, and we're already seeing publishers moving in that direction. That sets up both legal battles against AI companies and a possible future in which LLMs will have to pay to train data published on the open web. That could put traditional publishers as well as sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit in a stronger position.