GOOGLE TURNS TO YOUTUBE TO TRAIN AI

Content creators who make their livelihood by posting original videos on the platform aren’t happy about helping Veo, the tech giant’s text-to-video generator

- Wendy Lee

CHARLIE CHANG, a Santa Ana-based entrepreneur, fears his YouTube channels may become "irrelevant."

Santa Ana-based entrepreneur Charlie Chang spent years posting finance videos on YouTube before he made a profit.

Today, Chang's media business oversees more than 50 YouTube channels, along with other digital sites, and generates $3 million to $4 million in annual revenue, he said.

But lately, he's been faced with a new concern: that YouTube's moves in artificial intelligence will eat into his business.

"The fear is there, and I'm still building the channels, but I am preparing, just in case my channels become irrelevant," Chang, 33, said. "I don't know if I'm gonna be building YouTube channels forever."

YouTube's parent company, Google, is using a subset of the platform's videos to train AI applications, including its text-to-video tool Veo. That includes videos made by users who have built their livelihoods on the service, helping turn it into the biggest streaming entertainment provider in the US.

The move has sparked deep tensions between the world’s biggest online video company and some of the creators who helped make it a behemoth. Google, creators say, is using their data to train something that could become their biggest competitor.

The schism comes at a pivotal time for Google, which is in a race with rivals including Meta, OpenAl and Runway for dominance in the market for AI-driven video programs. Google has an advantage due to YouTube’s huge video library, with more than 20 billion videos uploaded to its platform as of April.