Youtube adds setting for uploaders to allow third party AI training on videos
Just saw the notification for this in my Youtube Studio. For now it seems as if this setting is turned off by default, but for anyone like myself who uploads videos to Youtube, I recommend checking that they don't decide to toggle this on for you in the future.
Coincidentally, Google just like two days ago revealed their new text-to-video AI model that somehow is leaps and bounds above the rest of the competition they attribute to better training data. How weird. Coincidentally weird, of course.
It's going to be fun navigating Youtube in the future when 95% of it is robotic videos with 95% AI comments below to match.
Honestly, I wish it was the other way around, a video-to-text service that writes a good synthesis, a complete transliteration with formating, or even an expanded version, with screenshoot images if deemed necessary. So many videos could be turned into nice essays and commentary.
Imagine companies using YouTube videos to train their AI customer service reps. You call in, and for a while think you're having a conversation with a person, but weirdly every minute and a half or so it's just randomly peppered with that metal gear solid alert sound, the inevitable waowwww sound effect, Michael Scott and Dr. Evil soundboard clips, then when you start getting suspicious that it may not actually be a real human on the other line they randomly go on an ad read for hellofresh out of nowhere
Guess which option will be set to off by users, which youtube will make the default to "on", and then entirely remove the button when users adapt to turning it off.
Looking at the general quality of YouTube videos, and the expected demographic of people that would select this option, this looks like a recipe for creating the most conspiracy-theory-oriented AI ever created.
The youtube videos have already been used to train AI. MKBHD proved it when sora crapped out his own plant in a generated "tech video". The question is whether google allowed it or not.
Both could be filtered out in theory (which they should do if they were smart, because amount of training data matters way less than quality or training data), but filtering AI created slop is harder, especially if you just slightly modify it.
I have a YouTube channel as well, and also got notified about this.
The setting is disabled by default, so I don't have a particularly large problem with it. But that might also be because I'm in the EU.
Surprisingly I'm in the US and it's off by default, at least for now. They'll toggle it on then claim it was an accident after they make a couple billion dollars.
Its not surprising. Youtube now has standing to sue other models for scrapping their information while also making it exclusive to third party consent - there is no toggle visible for google using to model ai.
This is them making it explicit that only they can use youtube, especially given how it has shown to be a great asset in putting them ahead with the text to video.
I don't upload YouTube videos so I'm unsure about the logistics of settings for videos. Do you get these options on videos already uploaded or is this only an option when first uploaded? Is this for the whole channel or video specific? Just curious how it works. Regardless if they ever decide to turn it on by default that would mean YouTubers would have to go through hundreds of videos and turn it off individually unless it's a channel wide setting kinda thing.
Edit: Just noticed it's under channel settings so I guess that's a good thing. If it was video specific that would be just plain evil. I guess I shouldn't give them ideas...
You know as a fact that they probably rolled out the feature.and then turned it on for every single uploaded video that ever existed in the platform before the rollout.