Welcome to the AI wars people. Google and OpenAI are just the start. YouTube (owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google as well) is taking a stance against OpenAI and its text-to-video AI, Sora. Sora is currently being trained, like every other AI, using the Internets vast trove of videos and other data.
Back Off Sora
OpenAI operates Sora and ChatGPT and is one of the more popular and most used AI brands out there. Microsoft also incorporates OpenAI into Bing and other products like Copilot. But now that OpenAI intends to train Sora on YouTube’s endless hours of video content (which is technically not YouTube’s but it belongs to the creators of YouTube), YouTube has objected.
According to Bloomberg, The use of YouTube videos to train OpenAI’s text-to-video generator would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan said.
In his first public remarks on the topic, Mohan said he had no firsthand knowledge of whether OpenAI had, in fact, used YouTube videos to refine its artificial intelligence-powered video creation tool, called Sora. But if that were the case, it would be a “clear violation” of YouTube’s terms of use, he said.
Some of us have found this stance by Alphabet a little amusing, considering that the company has been training Gemini AI on content from across the internet, including this publication, without asking for consent at all. X user Barry Schwartz explains this situation very well, in a short and simple manner:
Google to publishers — we can use your content to train our search engines and AI
Google to OpenAI — you cannot use YouTube to train your AI
YouTube is defending its position by saying that it is protecting its content creators from Sora and OpenAI. But are they really? If YouTube and Google believe that the creators’ hard work is their own and shouldn’t be used to train AI, then why is it OK for Gemini to do what Sora wants to do?
This is going to get fascinating! Be sure to watch my latest podcast on YouTube or listen on your favorite platform.
