{"id":16757,"date":"2025-09-11T21:51:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/16757\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T21:51:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T21:51:06","slug":"ai-is-trained-on-youtube-videos-now-we-can-see-which-ones-have-been-used","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/16757\/","title":{"rendered":"AI is trained on YouTube videos. Now we can see which ones have been used."},"content":{"rendered":"

The unlicensed reuse of YouTube videos as generative AI\u00a0training material is a hot-button issue<\/a> in the creator world, and a new report shows how deep that rabbit hole really goes. As part of an investigation titled AI Watchdog<\/a>,\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0explored large AI training data sets and published a tool<\/a> that lets users search through those sets in search of specific creators and channels.<\/p>\n

Videos that are repurposed for AI training typically have identifying details removed, but\u00a0Atlantic\u00a0reporter\u00a0Alex Reisner found a workaround by \u201cextracting unique identifiers from the data sets and looking them up on YouTube.\u201d From there, he was able to find the sources of the content included in these sets, a list that included creators like Jon Peters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA large number of the videos in these data sets are from news and educational channels, such as the BBC (which has at least 33,000 videos in the data sets, across its various brands) and TED (nearly 50,000),\u201d Reisner wrote<\/a>. \u201cHundreds of thousands of others\u2014if not more\u2014are from individual creators, such as Peters.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The report will undoubtedly cause further alarm among the creators who were already up in arms regarding the questionable ethics of AI training sets. Ripping YouTube videos en masse violates the platform\u2019s terms of service, but the presence of creator channels in these data sets shows that YouTube has more work to do if it wants to fully enforce that portion of its rules.<\/p>\n

Once the data sets reach tech companies, culpability is hard to pin down. Since the Nvidias and Metas of the world don\u2019t rip the training videos off YouTube themselves, they have plausible deniability when it comes to third-party sets. Spokespeople from Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon who responded to\u00a0The Atlantic\u2018s request for comment expressed their shared belief that the YouTube-based training they do is completely above board.<\/p>\n

Those statements may make some creators feel as if they are helpless to defend the ownership of their work. There are, however, some steps that can be taken by those who want to prevent their videos from being repurposed for AI training. Including overlays, such as watermarks or captions, makes videos less appealing to genAI developers (who don\u2019t want those features to show up in the content generated by their models). Platforms like YouTube also lets creators opt out<\/a> of having their videos made available for training, though based on the Atlantic\u00a0report, it\u2019s fair to question how effective that toggle is.<\/p>\n

The court of law could provide another layer of defense against unauthorized AI training, but creator-led lawsuits \u2014 such as David Millette\u2018s case against Nvidia<\/a> \u2014 have already been dismissed. If judges do end up siding with AI developer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The unlicensed reuse of YouTube videos as generative AI\u00a0training material is a hot-button issue in the creator world,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[365,18656,363,366,18657,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-16757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-ai-training","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-generative-ai","tag-homepage-feature","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}