Nvidia Caught Taking AI Data from Netflix and YouTube
Morrissey Technology – According to a report from 404 Media, Nvidia has used videos from YouTube, Netflix and other sources to build an AI model. Nvidia says its AI training methods are fully compliant with content and copyright laws. However, there is no definitive verdict on whether using an artist’s work to train an AI model is legal or not.
This particular model has not yet been released by Nvidia, but internally the AI model is called Cosmos and will be the foundation model for advanced video that can power various products such as world generators and digital humans. 404 Media obtained Slack messages showing Nvidia employees using a YouTube video downloader to grab content while discussing the legal and ethical considerations of the practice.
“We respect the rights of all content creators and believe that our models and research efforts fully comply with the letter and spirit of copyright law,” an Nvidia spokesperson told 404.
“Copyright law protects certain expressions, but it does not protect facts, ideas, data, or information. Anyone is free to learn facts, ideas, data, or information from other sources and use them to create their own expressions. Fair use also protects the ability to use a creation for transformative purposes, such as model training,” he continued.
However, YouTube views this practice as a violation of its policies, while Netflix also says that scraping is against its terms of service. According to the leak, Nvidia downloaded 100,000 videos from YouTube in just two weeks and collected more than 38.5 million video URLs. These links include content creators such as Marques Brownlee and the Architectural Digest channel. The documents also show that Nvidia trained its models on a dataset called HD-VG-130M that contains 130 million YouTube videos and is explicitly for academic research only. This leak makes it clear that Nvidia’s work is for commercial gain. When an employee raised legal and ethical concerns, Ming-Yu Liu, Nvidia’s Vice President of Research and leader of the Cosmos project, told them that the decision to obtain data this way had been made at the top of the company.
Nvidia has grown into a trillion-dollar company thanks to its computer chips that are the foundation for the booming AI market. OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are Nvidia customers and rely on its graphics processing units (GPUs). However, Nvidia does more than just hardware. Last week, Getty Images announced a deepening of its relationship with the company after releasing an updated AI image model based on the Nvidia Picasso model architecture.