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Runway faces backlash after report of copying AI video training data from YouTube

Runway revealed Gen-3 Alpha, an early version of the software, to acclaim for its realism, last month, and began allowing the public...

404 Media reports that a former employee of Runway leaked it a company spreadsheet allegedly showing its plans to categorize, tag, and train on “YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many other,” and that this data informed a product called “Jupiter,” which 404 says is Runway’s Gen-3 AI video creation model. Ed Newton-Rex, founder and CEO of the ethical AI certification startup Fairly Trained, has posted several times on X highlighting the various notable names included in the alleged Runway spreadsheet, among them YouTube channels for musician Taylor Swift and filmmaker Wes Anderson. Yet as I pointed out in a reply on X to Hollywood, multiple companies have already been accused or found to have used copyrighted videos without express permission or authorization or payment in training their models.

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