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Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI

“It’s theft.” A WIRED investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce to train AI.

The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Proof News contributor Alex Reisner obtained a copy of Books3, another Pile dataset, and last year published a piece in The Atlantic reporting his finding that more than 180,000 books, including those written by Margaret Atwood, Michael Pollan, and Zadie Smith, had been lifted. The African grey’s caretaker, Marcia, who didn’t want to use her last name for fear of endangering the famous bird’s safety, said at first she thought it was funny to learn AI models had ingested words of a mimicking parrot.

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