The YouTube channels of Netflix Anime, Aniplex USA, and GKIDS are among of the numerous YouTube channels whose videos have been scraped by AI company Runway. 404 Media shared a redacted massive spreadsheet detailing YouTube channels the company used to train its AI video generation tool in spite of this being against YouTube’s Terms of Service.
In addition to these, other anime-themed channels mentioned in the document include anime recap channels like Anime Recap Time, Recap-kun, and AniClimax; as well as anime-centric video essayists like Mastar and Anime Philosopher. Animenz Piano Sheets, Anime Luna, Utoi Anime Talk TV, and Anime Select were also seemingly scraped, as their channels were tagged with “anime.”
Apart from YouTube channels, it has also been reported that Runway’s AI also scrapped an Archive.org page featuring several Studio Ghibli movies, as well as several pirate sites including Aniwave, Animesuge, 9Anime, Aniwatch, and an iteration of the now-defunct KissAnime. A number of independent animation channels were also affected.
Google had previously warned OpenAI against using the platform’s videos to train AI model Sora, stating that it would be an infraction of the platform’s Terms of Service.
“From a creator’s perspective, when a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations. One of those expectations is that the terms of service is going to be abided by. It does not allow for things like transcripts or video bits to be downloaded, and that is a clear violation of our terms of service. Those are the rules of the road in terms of content on our platform,” YouTube CEO Neil Mohan told Bloomberg.
404 Media reports that an anonymous former employee of Runway revealed that there was a company-wide effort to compile video information into spreadsheets which would be used for AI training. The company then mass-downloaded the videos using readily available YouTube download tools, specifically YouTube-DL. It also employed a proxy service in order to avoid detection by YouTube when downloading multiple videos.
“The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build the model with. This was then used as input to a massive web crawler which downloaded all the videos from all those channels, using proxies to avoid getting blocked by Google,” the former employee told 404 Media.
While it hasn’t been yet verified whether all these channels’ videos were used to train Runway’s AI model, it is worth noting that the channels were categorized under tags, which couod be used as prompts whenever a user wants to generate a specific style of an AI video. Runway, which raised millions from backers including NVIDIA and Google last year, has not issued a statement on the topic.
Featured Image: Sword Art Online: Alicization, ©2017 Reki Kawahara/KADOKAWA Ascii/Media Works/SAO-A Project
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