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Right now, people are trying to navigate the rocky road that is the legal side of AI. Currently, companies like the New York Times are suing AI companies over potential copyright infringement. Well, the legal drama goes on, as YouTube’s CEO has warned OpenAI that training Sora using YouTube videos is against its rules.
A little while back, OpenAI announced Sora. This is an incredibly powerful video generation platform that can generate realistic-looking videos using text prompts. The results that it produces are extremely photorealistic, and it will undoubtedly be a major issue for filmmakers. Well, recently, OpenAI showed off Sora to Hollywood studios and directors. So, that’s going to be another can of worms.
YouTube’s CEO warns OpenAI that using YouTube videos is against its rules
The mass majority of services you encounter on the internet have what are called terms of service. If you want to use those services, you have to agree to abide by their terms. If not, you risk being booted off. YouTube has its terms of service, and they’ve become infamous for YouTubers over the years for sometimes being a bit heavy.
Amongst the jungle of terms, there is a section that prohibits people from using YouTube videos without the uploader’s consent. This applies to people downloading YouTube videos and re-uploading them or using them in different ways. However, it could also apply to AI companies scraping videos from YouTube and using them to train their AI models.
YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan has warned OpenAI that training Sora or any video generation platform using YouTube videos is a clear violation of YouTube’s terms of service. This isn’t to say that Sora has used YouTube videos, and this is not an initiation of legal action. It seems that the company is just covering its bases.
In order for Sora to create such realistic imagery, OpenAI needs to train it on a metric ton of video data. Well, YouTube is one of the largest reservoirs of video data in the world. However, it appears that the company does not want OpenAI to use its videos to train Sora.
From a creator’s perspective
Speaking to Bloomberg, Mohan stated that, “From a creator’s perspective, when a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations. One of those expectations is that the terms of service are going to be abided by.”
At this point, we’re not sure if YouTube is going to press this any further or go as far as to investigate. What we do know is that YouTube does not want its users’ videos being used to train an AI video generator. YouTubers can rest assured that OpenAI won’t scrape their videos.