Big Tech's trapped in a glass house on AI data snatching

Having exploited user data for years, the tables are turning as large tech players grab it from one another.

- Parmy Olson

A few weeks ago, the chief technology officer of OpenAI was asked if her company had used YouTube videos to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

First, she gave a blank stare. Then there was a grimace. Finally, Ms Mira Murati gave an answer that avoided the messy and furtive world she and other tech companies were operating in: "Actually, I'm not sure about that." According to a New York Times report, OpenAI in fact had trained its AI on "more than one million hours of YouTube videos" using a speech recognition tool called Whisper. All the conversational text from the transcriptions was used to train GPT-4, the flagship large language model that underpins ChatGPT.

Large tech players racing to build more capable AI models have reached a point where they have fewer and fewer places to look for data on the public web, and taking text from the transcripts of YouTube videos suggests OpenAI has been digging between the proverbial couch cushions, even at the risk of breaking someone's rules.