OpenAI faces a potential class-action lawsuit from YouTube content creators who claim the AI company used their videos without permission to train its language models, including ChatGPT.
Filed in California’s Northern District Court, the lawsuit alleges OpenAI transcribed millions of YouTube videos and incorporated them into training datasets for its AI products. The plaintiff, David Millette, argues this practice violates YouTube’s Terms of Service, which grant content creators ownership rights over their uploaded videos.
He contends that OpenAI’s practices constitute unfair competition under California law, seeking both injunctive relief and monetary damages for the affected class members.
At the heart of the complaint is the claim that OpenAI transcribed over one million hours of YouTube content. The suit points to OpenAI’s Whisper model, an automatic speech recognition system, which was reportedly trained on 680,000 hours of web-collected audio data.
This case highlights growing tensions between AI companies and content creators over the use of publicly available online material for AI training. As AI technologies advance, legal questions surrounding data usage and intellectual property rights in the digital age are coming to the forefront.
The lawsuit seeks class action status, aiming to represent all U.S. residents who have uploaded videos to YouTube that were subsequently transcribed and used by OpenAI without permission. The case will be heard in the Northern District of California, with the plaintiffs demanding over $5 million in compensatory, statutory, and punitive damages, as well as a halt to OpenAI’s alleged practices.
This legal battle could set a significant precedent for how AI companies source and utilize data, potentially reshaping the landscape of AI training and content creation. Either way, the outcome is likely to have significant implications for AI development practices and content creators’ rights in the evolving digital landscape.
OpenAI has not yet responded to the allegations. Maginative has not been able to independently confirm any YouTube accounts owned or operated by Millette.
