YouTube is editing billions of user’s videos and training AI without their consent

The story began to emerge in June, when news media worldwide revealed that Google was facing backlash for allegedly using over 20 billion YouTube videos without direct creator consent to train its new Veo3 AL model. Google, of course, responded to the accusations, citing existing terms and agreements as justification.

A month later, Proof News released research confirming that an investigation they conducted found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce.

Proof News said they also found material from YouTube megastars, including MrBeast (289 million subscribers, two videos taken for training), Marques Brownlee (19 million subscribers, seven videos taken), Jacksepticeye (nearly 31 million subscribers, 377 videos taken), and PewDiePie (111 million subscribers, 337 videos taken). Some of the material used to train AI also promoted conspiracies such as the “flat-Earth theory.”

“No one came to me and said, ‘We would like to use this,’” David Pakman, host of “The David Pakman Show,” a left-leaning politics channel with more than two million subscribers and more than two billion views, told Proof News. Nearly 160 of his videos were included in the YouTube Subtitles training dataset. 

It amounts to theft

“It’s theft,” said Dave Wiskus, the CEO of Nebula, a streaming service partially owned by its creators, some of whom have had their work taken from YouTube to train AI. Wiskus said it’s “disrespectful” to use creators’ work without their consent, especially since studios may use “generative AI to replace as many of the artists along the way as they can.”

However, according to an August 24 report by the BBC, the abuse and illegal use of AI on content creators’ videos does not stop there. YouTube In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people’s videos without letting them know or asking permission.

Many creators began noticing subtle changes in their videos. Rick Beato, who runs a YouTube channel in which he explores the world of music and which has over 5 million subscribers, began to realise changes that did not look right to him.

“I was like, ‘Man, my hair looks strange’. And the closer I looked, it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup. I thought, ‘Am I just imagining things?’” It turns out he was not, the BBC said.

‘The more I got upset’

“The more I looked at it, the more upset I got,” said Rhett Shull, another popular music YouTuber. Shull, a friend of Beato’s, started looking into his own posts and spotted the same strange artefacts. He posted a video on the subject that’s racked up over 500,000 views. “If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening, I would have done it myself. But the bigger thing is, it looks AI-generated. I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet. It could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience in a small way. It just bothers me.”

Complaints on social media began in June, with users posting close-ups of odd-looking body parts and questioning YouTube’s intentions. After months of rumours in comment sections, the company has finally confirmed it is altering a limited number of videos on YouTube Shorts, the app’s short-form video feature.

“We’re running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video),” said Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s head of editorial and creator liaison, in a post on X. “YouTube is always working on ways to provide the best video quality and experience possible, and will continue to take creator and viewer feedback into consideration as we iterate and improve on these features.” YouTube did not respond to the BBC’s questions about whether users will be given a choice about AI tweaking their videos.