From Tom's Hardware: Some of the world's wealthiest companies, including Apple and Nvidia, are among countless parties who allegedly trained their AI using scraped YouTube videos as training data. The YouTube transcripts were reportedly accumulated through means that violate YouTube's Terms of Service and have some creators seeing red. The news was first discovered in a joint investigation by Proof News and Wired.
While major AI companies and producers often keep their AI training data secret, heavyweights like Apple, Nvidia, and Salesforce have revealed their use of "The Pile", an 800GB training dataset created by EleutherAI, and the YouTube Subtitles dataset within it. The YouTube Subtitles training data is made up of 173,536 YouTube plaintext transcripts scraped from the site, including 12,000+ videos which have been removed since the dataset's creation in 2020.
Affected parties whose work was purportedly scraped for the training data include education channels like Crash Course (1,862 videos taken for training) and Philosophy Tube (146 videos taken), YouTube megastars like MrBeast (two videos) and Pewdiepie (337 videos), and TechTubers like Marques Brownlee (seven videos) and Linus Tech Tips (90 videos). Proof News created a tool you can use to survey the entirety of the YouTube videos allegedly used without consent.
EleutherAI is a respectably-sized force in the AI training space. The non-profit AI research lab is one of many aiming to "democratize" AI for the masses, with its website stating a goal to "ensure that the ability to study foundation models is not restricted to a handful of companies". The Pile and YouTube Subtitles datasets were created for this purpose, to provide high-quality training data to even the scrappiest of at-home AI coders. However, this idyllic dream of supporting the little guy with The Pile has become another fuel source for major corporations to train AI, rather than DIYers.
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