Yeah, AI can totally exist and be useful, but currently it's in the hands of tech dudes and admins who have a terrible track record with developing things responsibly and over hyping and masking flaws. It's used to make a profit at the colossal detriment to humans. It's used to hurt us currently, not help at all.

I think the training data from reddit probably only used the API because it was easier and free. And if no longer free, there's nothing pointing to them actually paying for it. It's not like reddit is the only data, they very much likely already have web scrapers for other uses that they can just tune for reddit.