News AI Generator Scraped YouTube Videos Without Permission, Including Nintendo's

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Runway, the multi-billion dollar company claiming to 'move creativity forward' with artificial intelligence (yuck!) has reportedly trained its text-to-video generator by scraping thousands of videos from YouTube, potentially including several of Nintendo's channels.

As discovered and reported by 404 Media, the information comes via a comprehensive spreadsheet obtained by the outlet, in which Nintendo's regional channels are listed across ten rows. Other major companies listed include the likes of Disney, Rockstar Games, Netflix, and Sony.

An anonymous Runway employee spoke to 404 and stated:

"The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build the model with. This was then used as input to a massive web crawler which downloaded all the videos from all those channels, using proxies to avoid getting blocked by Google."

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The generator - officially named Gen-3 - drew significant praise upon its reveal earlier this year, with the likes of Google and Nvidia supplying Runway with funding to realize its vision. Despite Google's investment, however, a previous Bloomberg article highlights that utilizing YouTube videos as a way to train AI would be a violation of the company's policies.

Although it's not known whether Nintendo's content has definitively been used to train Gen-3, its mere presence within the spreadsheet will likely spur the company to pursue the matter further. Nintendo is staunchly protective of its IP, and frequently combats instances of piracy that may negatively impact the brand.