YouTube has just made a huge update to how videos are used for AI training by letting creators opt-in to letting companies scrape their videos.
Ever since the Generative AI hype train began taking off in early 2023, more and more areas of the internet are being used to train the models used to make these new creations.
YouTube is one of them, with some third-party companies going as far as scraping videos from creators like MKBHD and MrBeast without permission, prompting backlash in the process.
The Google-owned video platform has just made a huge update that changes how videos are used for AI training by giving creators the choice over whether or not their videos can be used for AI.
YouTubers can opt-in to AI training
According to TechCrunch, YouTube has rolled out a new feature in the creator dashboard that gives users the choice of how third-party companies can use their content to train AI models.
It’s off by default, but once opted-in you can either choose to allow all companies to train their AI models on your content or limit which companies have access.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
The companies that YouTube is letting you choose from include AI21 Labs, Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, ByteDance, Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Perplexity, Pika Labs, Runway, Stability AI, and xAI.
Among the list of companies is Runway, which prompted backlash back in July 2024 after it was revealed they trained on over 1700 MKBHD videos without permission – prompting the tech YouTuber to comment on the situation.
“Well well well. Runway AI video generator was trained on YouTube videos without permission, including 1600+ MKBHD videos,” he said alongside a melting face emoji.
This is just the latest AI-focused feature or option that YouTube has added in recent months. YouTube launched AI comment recommendations to help people reply to viewers in early December, but users aren’t exactly happy with the feature.
