In the latest salvo in the high-stakes battle between artificial intelligence and creatives, YouTube has terminated two popular channels that used AI to produce fake movie trailers.
YouTube has removed two popular channels that created fake movie trailers. Screen Culture and KH Studio had more than 2 million subscribers combined. (Dreamstime/TNS)
The video-sharing platform, headquartered in San Bruno and owned by Google, shut down the accounts of Screen Culture and KH Studio, according to a report published by Deadline on Thursday, Dec. 18.
The channels had more than 2 million subscribers combined, generating more than 1 billion views. They have been replaced by a 404 pages that says “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that.”
YouTube said the channels, which were thought to have generated millions of dollars in revenue for its companies, violated its spam and misleading-metadata policies.
The move comes one week after the Walt Disney Co. sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, claiming that the Menlo Park tech company’s AI training models and services infringe on its copyrights on a “massive scale.”
That same week, Disney and OpenAI struck a three-year licensing deal that would allow the San Francisco AI research and deployment company’s Sora platform to generate short, user-prompted social videos featuring more than 200 characters across Disney, Marvel, Pixar and “Star Wars” – from Mickey Mouse to Darth Vader.
Screen Culture, based in India, specializes in using existing marketing materials to create trailers to appeal to fans, such as a “Superman” version that misrepresented scenes from the James Gunn film through AI enhancement and manipulation.
Others include 23 trailers for Marvel Studio’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” months ahead of its theatrical release in July by Disney. Many viewers thought the promotional videos, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results, were authentic.
Meanwhile, Georgia-based KH Studio created completely fictional previews, imagining a James Bond movie starring Henry Cavill and Margot Robbie, and a “Squid Game” season with Leonardo DiCaprio, according to Deadline.
In March, YouTube turned off the ad revenue capabilities of both companies out of copyright concerns, but reinstated their monetization capabilities after they agreed to label their videos as “fan trailer,” “parody” or “concept trailer.” However, that labelling disappeared from both channels in recent months.
Fake and fan-created AI movie content is still prevalent on the internet, including on YouTube. Examples include one channel that reimagines popular franchises such as “Star Wars” and “Game of Thrones” as if they were made in the 1950s, and another that specializes in humorous content such as depicting “Dora the Explorer” as an R-rated action film.
This article originally published at YouTube terminates popular channels that created fake movie trailers.