YouTube content creator David Milette has filed a precedent-setting lawsuit against OpenAI for using video transcripts without permission to train artificial intelligence models. What does this case mean for artificial intelligence and data usage?

YouTuber David Milette has filed a precedent-setting lawsuit against OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. According to the YouTuber’s claims, OpenAI used transcripts of YouTube videos in artificial intelligence without permission and without paying royalties. Milette’s lawyers, who filed a filing with the court on Friday, say OpenAI dishonestly collected transcripts of video content and used them in the training sets of ChatGPT and other chatbots. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI made huge profits from the data and violated YouTube’s terms of service.

YouTuber files $5 million lawsuit for damages

Millette is seeking a jury trial and damages of more than $5 million on behalf of all YouTube users and content creators whose data was used without consent in training OpenAI.

This case shows that data used for AI training can be controversial in terms of copyright. Similar issues have arisen in the past. Here are some examples:

• It was reported that unauthorized data was collected from YouTube videos and this data was used to train language models used for Apple Intelligence.
• In April, The New York Times reported that OpenAI had developed a speech recognition model called Whisper that had transcribed more than a million hours of video from YouTube, and that the transcriptions were being used to train GPT-4.
• Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk have filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. Musk alleged that OpenAI only offers its advanced technologies to commercial customers.

According to Originality.AI, more than 35% of the top 1,000 websites in the world block OpenAI’s web browser. MIT’s Data Sourcing Initiative states that 25% of “high quality” data is restricted to the large datasets used to train AI models. The case stands out as a significant example that calls into question legal and ethical boundaries. We can say that the shrinking number of data sources already shows the problems that the artificial intelligence industry may face in the future.