A data story · five chapters
Does Your Sub-reddit
Allow AI-Generated
Content?
A data story about how Reddit's largest communities are responding to AI — and where yours stands
4,335
communities studied
706
have written an AI rule
3×
growth since 2023
↓
scroll to chapter one
The world is paying attention to AI.
WHERE THE RULES ARE BEING WRITTEN
Global AI investment exploded between 2018 and 2023, growing roughly 10-fold. At the same time something happened on Reddit. Moderators from 4,335 communities—r/art, r/writing, r/photography, r/machinelearning, and thousands more—decided to write their own rules about AI. By May 2026, 706 of them had explicit AI policies. This is the story of how Reddit regulated AI faster than nations did.
Data: Stanford HAI (2026). AI Index Report. Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Initiative.
Across 71 countries with complete data, policy activity and investment show only weak correlation, showing that national AI governance follows different trajectories than AI deployment. Data: IMF AI Preparedness Index 2024. International Monetary Fund. Lloyd, T., Gosciak, J., Nguyen, T., & Naaman, M. (2025). AI Rules? Characterizing Reddit community policies towards AI-generated content. In Proceedings of CHI '25.
4,335 communities. 706 decisions already made.
Different communities made very different calls.
The rules aren't spreading evenly. Writing and Art communities have the highest adoption rates since 2023—about a third of them have explicit AI policies. Health, News, and Politics communities moved slower. Some communities, like Video Games and Celebrity, even reversed course after 2024. Each is negotiating what AI governance means for itself.
Adoption rates from July 2023 to May 2026, by community type. Writing and Art communities maintain the highest rates. Most types show sustained growth, though pace varied. Video Games and Celebrity are exceptions. Data: Lloyd, Gosciak, Nguyen, & Naaman (2025). CHI '25.
Where rules do exist, the choices are stark. Outright bans dominate. Nuanced policies—disclosure, permission with conditions—are rare, even in communities like Technology and Art where you'd expect more diversity.
Rule stances by community type, 2024 vs 2026.
2024: In 2024, outright bans are the most common stance but qualified bans make up a notable share across many community types. Technology and Science and Art communities show the most varied distributions, with meaningful proportions of disclosure and enabling policies alongside bans.
2026: By 2026, outright bans dominate across all community types. Technology and Science and Art communities still show the most diverse stance distributions, while News, Politics, Health, and several others have rules that are exclusively or near-exclusively outright bans. Data: Lloyd, Gosciak, Nguyen, & Naaman (2025). CHI '25.
Two snapshots of moderator-stated concerns
Rationales that drive each rule stance, 2024 vs 2026. In 2024, communities took extreme stances where bans dominated. By 2026, responses spread across the spectrum, with more nuanced restrictions and disclosure requirements. Data: Lloyd, Gosciak, Nguyen, & Naaman (2025). CHI '25.
EPILOGUE · THE DATASET IS YOURS
You've read the story.
Now see it in practice.
Find your subreddit. What rule did they write? Does it make sense?
START EXPLORING ↓
Each bubble is a community type. Click to explore individual rules. Click two bubbles to compare them side by side. Search by name to find your community and see what it decided - which stance it took and why, based on moderators' stated concerns.
Bubbles are sized by community count, colored by dominant stance. The detail panel shows individual subreddits, their rules, stances, and rationales. Search any of the 4,335 communities to see if it has an explicit AI rule and what stance it takes. Data: Lloyd, Gosciak, Nguyen, & Naaman (2025). CHI '25.
Read the actual rules
Forget aggregates for a second. These are real sentences from real subreddit wikis, written in 2026.
Filter by stance
Methodology
We analyzed data crawled in July 2023 and November 2024 by Lloyd et al. (2025) in their paper. Following the process they described, we conducted a comprehensive scrape of Reddit's public wiki and moderation documentation across 4,335 communities with over 100,000 members each as part of our 2026 addition to the analyzed data.
The method for rule-labeling as outlined by Lloyd et al. (2025) includes the identification of AI-related rules through keyword matching and manual review. Rules were classified into five stance categories based on moderation intent. This classification was conducted using large language models (LLMs) with a 10% hand-check sample to ensure accuracy. Rationale types were identified through a similar process. In our analysis, these rationales were tracked across time snapshots to reveal shifts in moderator concerns and priorities.
References
- Lloyd, T., Gosciak, J., Nguyen, T., & Naaman, M. (2025). AI Rules? Characterizing Reddit Community Policies Towards AI-Generated Content. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25).
- Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). (2026). AI Index Report 2026. Stanford University.
- Hung, J. (2025). Global AI Diffusion Index 2025. Harvard Dataverse.
In collaboration with
University of Washington /
HCDE 511: Information Visualization & Design. Spring 2026.
Credits
Visualization Design & Development
Arundhati Ramesh · Jenny Yu
Faculty Advisor
Holger Kuehnle
Primary Dataset & Research
Lloyd, T. · Gosciak, J. · Nguyen, T. · Naaman, M. (CHI 2025)
Data Accuracy & Disclaimer
This analysis represents a snapshot of moderation policies at the time of data collection. Reddit communities regularly update their rules, and this dataset reflects policy text as of May 2026. For the most current rules, visit individual subreddit wikis directly. We've taken care to hand-verify a sample of AI rule classifications, but errors may remain. If you spot inaccuracies or have questions about our methodology, please reach out.