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Is Google Training AI on YouTube Videos?

2024-08-23 · explainer · Hank · 29:48 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: News analysis · tags: timely hook, civic or action cta

Hank argues that Google appears to train its generative AI on independent YouTubers' videos under the standard terms-of-service license's derivative-works clause, as it does with Reddit content it bought; he says creators never agreed to this new use and asks YouTube to let them opt out.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Investigations find AI companies trained on YouTube videos and transcripts, including Complexly's channels

  • ★★ Hank reports that 404 Media found a generative AI video company, Runway, trained on thousands of videos without permission, including thousands of SciShow and Crash Course videos. — 00:00:00 · SciShow, Crash Course
  • ★★ Hank reports that a Proof News investigation found transcripts of 173,536 YouTube videos were provided to Apple, Salesforce, Nvidia and Anthropic to train their models. — 00:00:29 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says Proof News's searchable database shows SciShow, Crash Course, Eons and Vlogbrothers are all in the training data, and probably any YouTuber a viewer likes. — 00:00:29 · SciShow, Crash Course, Eons, Vlogbrothers, YouTube

00:00:58 — Creators don't want their work used; what generative AI means here, as opposed to other AI and AGI

  • ★★ Hank says a substantial majority of creators he has talked to, whether artists, photographers, musicians or YouTubers, don't want their work used to train AI, or want an opt-out. — 00:00:58 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank defines his subject as generative AI, models that train on content and create more (Midjourney, Sora, LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude), not AI that transcribes or recommends. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Hank distinguishes generative AI from artificial general intelligence, which he calls a vastly different thing that doesn't exist. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — Complexly's channels among the most used; two views of AI learning; why Hank feels ripped off; the Walmart Sprite anecdote

  • ★★★ Hank says his company has more videos in the dataset than almost anyone: Marques Brownlee 9, MrBeast 19, Mark Rober 24, MinutePhysics 85, against Vlogbrothers 188, SciShow over 300, Crash Course 982. (hedged) — 00:02:26 · Complexly, Vlogbrothers, SciShow, Crash Course
  • ★★ Hank says the only channel he has seen with more videos in the dataset is Khan Academy; TED-Ed has over 400 and MIT hundreds. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Hank concludes that educational content is particularly valuable for training large language models, another reason some creators might decide differently about their content. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Hank sets out two views: AI programs just learn like any human watching a video, or programs aren't people, making this an entirely new use of copyrighted content. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Hank, whose company owns much of the data, asks lawyers who think Complexly has a case to email Kelsey at Complexly. — 00:03:53 · Complexly
  • ★★★ Hank says he is definitely getting ripped off: big companies signed licensing deals and are paid for their data being in AI models, and he is not. — 00:03:53
  • ★ Comparing AI firms to people who expect not to get caught, Hank admits that working at Walmart he filled his water bottle with Sprite before bringing in the carts. (playful) — 00:04:22
  • ★★ Hank says the taken material is the property of 50,000 independent creators with fairly big audiences, who will go to bat for them when asked. — 00:04:22

00:04:52 — Does Google train on YouTubers' videos? Neal Mohan's Bloomberg answers, the terms-of-service license, lawsuits and the new use

  • ★★★ Hank poses the question many fear to ask: does Google, a company creators have a relationship with, train its generative AI models on YouTubers' videos? — 00:04:52 · Google, YouTube
  • ★★ Neal Mohan (quoted): In a Bloomberg interview, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says that if YouTube were used to train Sora, it would be against YouTube's policy. — 00:05:21 · YouTube
  • ★★ Neal Mohan (quoted): Mohan says YouTube's terms of service allow scraping titles, channel names and creator names, but downloading transcripts or video is a clear violation. — 00:05:21 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank notes Mohan did not say creators expect their content not to train AI; he said they expect the terms of service upheld, which say nothing about AI training. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ Neal Mohan (quoted): Asked whether Google uses YouTube to train Gemini, Mohan says Google uses YouTube content in accordance with the terms of service or individual contracts with creators. — 00:06:36 · Google, YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says that unlike record labels or legacy media, YouTubers like him and Marques Brownlee have no special deal: all share the standard terms of service. — 00:06:36 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank reads the terms-of-service license: uploaders grant YouTube a worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable, transferable license including to prepare derivative works. — 00:07:25 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says Google sees this license as sufficient for training generative AI: legally weaker than explicit language about training, but solid enough for them. — 00:07:55 · Google
  • ★★ Hank says no one knows whether training AI under a derivative-works license is legal; many lawsuits on it are under way. (unsure) — 00:07:55
  • ★★ Hank reads that the New York Times lawsuit seeks billions in damages from OpenAI for unlawful copying and calls for destroying models and training data using Times material. — 00:08:24 · The New York Times
  • ★★ Hank says that at one point OpenAI's model, asked to finish an article, would show the text of a paywalled article. — 00:08:53
  • ★★★ Hank's main point for YouTube and YouTubers: training LLMs did not exist when his license was written; it is a new use, and claiming the old license covers it doesn't feel great. — 00:08:53 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank has personally uploaded over a thousand videos and his company over 9,000; they did not upload them thinking this was part of their license. — 00:09:32 · Complexly

00:10:30 — Gemini's answer, YouTube's no comment, and subtitle and translation training as proof the license is read to allow AI training

  • ★ Asked by Hank why YouTube is so obtuse, Gemini suggests legal and ethical concerns and bad publicity from using user-generated content without permission; Hank notes Gemini may be wrong. (playful, hedged) — 00:10:30 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank asked his YouTube contacts whether Google trains Gemini on YouTubers' property; they said YouTube had no comment beyond Mohan's Bloomberg interview. — 00:11:29 · YouTube, Google
  • ★★ Hank favors Google's training of AI on YouTube videos for subtitles and translations: it gives him and the world value, and he would not opt out. — 00:11:29 · Google, YouTube
  • ★★★ Because those transcription and translation models needed no change to the terms of service, Hank concludes YouTube's lawyers read the existing terms as allowing AI training. — 00:11:58 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Connecting the dots, Hank concludes that the creators Mohan says have licensing contracts allowing AI training are ordinary YouTubers under the standard terms of service. — 00:12:27 · YouTube

00:12:56 — The long case: training data hunger, the open-web argument, robots.txt, Reddit's block and licensing deals, and the derivative-works clause

  • ★★ Hank explains generative AI works only by training on enormous data and needs ever more; OpenAI made ChatGPT, which started the boom, by training on everything. — 00:12:56
  • ★★ Mustafa Suleyman (quoted): The CEO of Microsoft AI says content on the open web has, since the 90s, been fair use that anyone can copy and reproduce, freeware. — 00:13:26
  • ★★ Hank explains the open web is narrower than the internet: emails, paywalled content and pages telling crawlers not to index them are not part of it. — 00:13:53
  • ★★★ Hank calls this legally and ethically wrong: a deep, almost willful misunderstanding of copyright law that publishing on the open web makes something free for anyone's use. — 00:14:23
  • ★★ Hank's example: he cannot publish a storybook from r/nosleep stories, which belong not to Reddit but to the people who wrote them. — 00:14:23 · Reddit
  • ★★ Mustafa Suleyman (quoted): The Microsoft AI CEO says content whose publisher explicitly forbade scraping beyond indexing is a gray area that will work its way through the courts. — 00:15:21
  • ★★ Hank says OpenAI, part-owned by Microsoft, built ChatGPT on everything including gray-area material: books, YouTube transcripts and paywalled content. — 00:15:21 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank would be roughly okay with such data gathering for research, but OpenAI launched a paid product, took investment and made billions. — 00:15:50
  • ★★ Hank says training data is finite, more is better, Google and OpenAI have gathered basically all of it, and now they are losing some to legal doubts. — 00:16:20 · Google
  • ★★ Hank says the hope that models could create their own training data sounds silly to him, though he is not an expert. (hedged) — 00:16:20
  • ★★ Hank calls web crawlers, programs following links and storing what they find, the genius innovation that made the web and search engines possible. — 00:16:49
  • ★★ Touring YouTube's robots.txt, Hank shows all robots are barred from some pages but welcome on video and channel pages, while Google Media Partners' robots may go anywhere. — 00:18:16 · YouTube, Google
  • ★★ Hank explains robots.txt, a public file on nearly every site, as the original way websites told crawlers which parts they may scrape. — 00:18:46
  • ★★ Hank says what worries Mohan is companies using robots to scrape YouTube data that YouTube forbids, against its terms of service and possibly the law. — 00:19:15 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank shows that a month ago Reddit's robots.txt left almost all of Reddit open to search engines, while today it disallows all robots. — 00:20:13 · Reddit
  • ★★ Hank says that after ChatGPT OpenAI was worth about $86 billion, and Anthropic, Google, Apple, Meta and Nvidia rushed to build their own LLMs from internet data. — 00:20:13 · Google
  • ★★ Hank says there is something in generative AI, though no one knows what; it might collapse over copyright or emptiness, but companies think something is there. (hedged) — 00:20:52
  • ★★★ Hank says Reddit, blocking all scrapers, has done deals with OpenAI and Google letting them train on its data for pay, sending it to them directly. — 00:21:21 · Reddit, Google
  • ★★★ Hank says what Reddit sells is not Reddit's: its users created and own those posts, yet Reddit sold the right to train AI on them. — 00:21:50 · Reddit
  • ★★ Hank reads Reddit's user license: a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, transferable, sub-licensable license including to prepare derivative works, much like YouTube's. — 00:22:28 · Reddit, YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank's case: if the derivative-works clause is good enough for Google's lawyers to train on Redditors' content, it is good enough for YouTubers' content. — 00:22:57 · Google, Reddit, YouTube

00:23:26 — Hank thinks Google is wrong, declares his bias toward YouTube, and asks for an opt-out

  • ★★★ Hank says Google thinks training on YouTubers' copyrighted content is fine; he thinks they are wrong: he doesn't know if it is legal, but doesn't think it is right. — 00:23:26 · Google, YouTube
  • ★★ After 18 years uploading, Hank says YouTube's people understand they power a creative revolution and take that responsibility far more seriously than other major players. — 00:23:55 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says he likes Neal Mohan, thinks he is a fantastic leader and is glad to have him at the helm. — 00:23:55
  • ★★ Hank says he is no journalist: a YouTuber with a long relationship with YouTube, biased in favor of both YouTubers and YouTube, not out to spin the story for views. — 00:24:25 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank worries that souring his relationship with YouTube could cause him serious economic harm, though probably it won't, as YouTube seems good at siloing. (hedged) — 00:24:25 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says that when he implicitly agreed to the license by uploading, he did not think, and could not have thought, he was agreeing to LLM training. — 00:24:54
  • ★★ Hank knows many YouTubers don't want their content used to train LLMs, but doesn't know if they're right or what he would choose; some uses he'd favor, some would infuriate him. (unsure) — 00:25:16 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says it is not that he distrusts YouTube's people, but that he doesn't trust they will always share his incentives. — 00:25:49 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says X recently let Twitter users opt out of having their data used to train its LLMs, with the box checked by default. — 00:25:49 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank asks YouTube to opt creators in if it wants but give every YouTuber the chance to opt out of AI training. — 00:25:49 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says he cannot opt out of YouTube: he built his company there, with 70 employees, and his community and heart are there. — 00:25:49 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says creators did not agree to a license allowing this use of their property, but YouTube is acting as if they did. (hedged) — 00:26:37 · YouTube
  • ★★ Hank says that in 2026 the EU's AI law will require disclosure of training data. — 00:26:37

00:27:01 — EU AI Act disclosure in 2026; comment and survey asks; credit to Milo

  • ★★ Hank predicts that in two years everyone will know, and asks YouTube whether it would rather let creators clean up its dataset and agree or not to the new use now. — 00:27:01 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank asks YouTube creators who think they should be able to opt out of generative AI training to leave a comment saying so. — 00:27:01 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank points creators to a survey linked in the description, which they can fill out anonymously or not. — 00:27:31
  • ★★ Hank says he will share the survey data with YouTube to help it understand how YouTubers feel. — 00:27:31 · YouTube
  • ★ In an addendum recorded three weeks after filming, Hank says making the video was a whole project and thanks Milo for helping edit it and making graphics. — 00:27:31

00:28:00 — Addendum: Google's ownership of YouTube removes any payment; pride in what creators built on YouTube; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank's final point: if Google didn't own YouTube, YouTube would not let Google train on YouTubers' videos; companies would pay, and YouTubers would expect a revenue share. — 00:28:00 · YouTube, Google
  • ★★★ Hank says because Google owns YouTube it apparently doesn't have to pay, and no rival can pay, since Google won't sell YouTube's data to competitors. (hedged) — 00:28:29 · Google, YouTube
  • ★★ Hank tells John he is proud and amazed at what they, Complexly's people and his YouTuber friends have done on YouTube, which feels more sustainable than similar platforms. — 00:28:58 · John Green, Complexly, YouTube
  • ★★★ Hank says YouTube treats creators not as website users but as business partners, which is almost always how it feels, but not in this situation. — 00:29:28 · YouTube

In the description and comments

  • ★★ In a channel comment, Hank says he still owns his video after uploading it; he has read the license. — creator comment · YouTube
  • ★★ In a channel comment, Hank says he has heard YouTube is working hard to stop scraping. — creator comment · YouTube
  • ★★ In a channel comment, Hank says no one knows whether AI training is copyright infringement; the lawsuits will decide. (unsure) — creator comment
  • ★★ In a channel comment, Hank says he was a little surprised, and that their refusal to say it out loud suggests it matters whether they are actually doing it. — creator comment · Google, YouTube

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: derivative work · Gemini · generative artificial intelligence · Google · Neal Mohan · Reddit · robots.txt · terms of service · YouTube

Also: People: Henry Reich · Kelsey · Mark Rober · Marques Brownlee · MrBeast · Mustafa Suleyman

Projects: Complexly · Crash Course · Eons · SciShow

Organizations: 404 Media · Anthropic · Apple · Bloomberg News · Khan Academy · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Meta Platforms · Microsoft · Nvidia · OpenAI · Proof News · Runway · Salesforce · TED-Ed · The New York Times · Twitter · Walmart

Groups: Flight of the Conchords

Concepts: artificial general intelligence · copyright · fair use · large language model · legacy media · user-generated content · web crawler

Events: Olympic Games

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · Midjourney · Sora · Sprite

Policies: Artificial Intelligence Act

Only in the description or credits: Milo

Also centred on generative artificial intelligence: What is 'Slop' (and why it gives me hope)

Later videos replying to this one

  • 2024-08-27 · How The Internet Is Rigged (John) — continues — “I really loved your video about how Google and other large companies are stealing from independent creators to train generative artificial intelligence.” (00:00:00)