Report: Apple, Nvidia Trained AI Models on YouTube Captions Without Permission
The Facts
An investigation has claimed that a dataset used to help train artificial intelligence (AI) models from companies such as Apple, Anthropic, and Nvidia contains subtitles from over 100K YouTube videos that were included without the consent of the content creators.
YouTube Subtitles, which is part of a large dataset known as The Pile, contains captions from over 173K videos that span 48K channels. Taking data from the platform without prior approval would violate YouTube guidelines.
The Spin
Narrative A
In their quest to gobble up content to train their models, AI companies have run roughshod over the rights any creator who has their work present on the internet. Copyrighted data present in a training set can be reproduced almost exactly by end users, in many instances, as these lucrative AI tools are built on the backs of uncompensated creators.
Narrative B
The hysteria over data scraping for AI training has reached a fever pitch, and it would be akin to an author suing a child for learning to read using one of their books. AI models do not actually copy content verbatim, but use it to adjust probability values to make human-seeming output. AI generated material will complement, not replace, the work of humans.