Latest news with #Pixar-like
CNBC
3 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
Google is using YouTube videos to train its AI video generator
Google is using its expansive library of YouTube videos to train its artificial intelligence models, including Gemini and the Veo 3 video and audio generator, CNBC has learned. The tech company is turning to its catalog of 20 billion YouTube videos to train these new-age AI tools, according to a person who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Google confirmed to CNBC that it relies on its vault of YouTube videos to train its AI models, but the company said it only uses a subset of its videos for the training and that it honors specific agreements with creators and media companies. "We've always used YouTube content to make our products better, and this hasn't changed with the advent of AI," said a YouTube spokesperson in a statement. "We also recognize the need for guardrails, which is why we've invested in robust protections that allow creators to protect their image and likeness in the AI era — something we're committed to continuing." Such use of YouTube videos has the potential to lead to an intellectual property crisis for creators and media companies, experts said. While YouTube says it has shared this information previously, experts who spoke with CNBC said it's not widely understood by creators and media organizations that Google is training its AI models using its video library. YouTube didn't say how many of the 20 billion videos on its platform or which ones are used for AI training. But given the platform's scale, training on just 1% of the catalog would amount to 2.3 billion minutes of content, which experts say is more than 40 times the training data used by competing AI models. The company shared in a blog post published in September that YouTube content could be used to "improve the product experience … including through machine learning and AI applications." Users who have uploaded content to the service have no way of opting out of letting Google train on their videos. "It's plausible that they're taking data from a lot of creators that have spent a lot of time and energy and their own thought to put into these videos," said Luke Arrigoni, CEO of Loti, a company that works to protect digital identity for creators. "It's helping the Veo 3 model make a synthetic version, a poor facsimile, of these creators. That's not necessarily fair to them." CNBC spoke with multiple leading creators and IP professionals, none were aware or had been informed by YouTube that their content could be used to train Google's AI models. The revelation that YouTube is training on its users' videos is noteworthy after Google in May announced Veo 3, one of the most advanced AI video generators on the market. In its unveiling, Google showcased cinematic-level video sequences, including a scene of an old man on a boat and another showing Pixar-like animals talking with one another. The entirety of the scenes, both the visual and the audio, were entirely AI generated. According to YouTube, an average of 20 million videos are uploaded to the platform each day by independent creators by nearly every major media company. Many creators say they are now concerned they may be unknowingly helping to train a system that could eventually compete with or replace them. "It doesn't hurt their competitive advantage at all to tell people what kind of videos they train on and how many they trained on," Arrigoni said. "The only thing that it would really impact would be their relationship to creators." Even if Veo 3's final output does not directly replicate existing work, the generated content fuels commercial tools that could compete with the creators who made the training data possible, all without credit, consent or compensation, experts said. When uploading a video to the platform, the user is agreeing that YouTube has a broad license to the content. "By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content," the terms of service read. "We've seen a growing number of creators discover fake versions of themselves circulating across platforms — new tools like Veo 3 are only going to accelerate the trend," said Dan Neely, CEO of Vermillio, which helps individuals protect their likeness from being misused and also facilitates secure licensing of authorized content. Neely's company has challenged AI platforms for generating content that allegedly infringes on its clients' intellectual property, both individual and corporate. Neely says that although YouTube has the right to use this content, many of the content creators who post on the platform are unaware that their videos are being used to train video-generating AI software. Vermillio uses a proprietary tool called Trace ID to asses whether an AI-generated video has significant overlap with a human-created video. Trace ID assigns scores on a scale of zero to 100. Any score over 10 for a video with audio is considered meaningful, Neely said. In one example cited by Neely, a video from YouTube creator Brodie Moss closely matched content generated by Veo 3. Trace ID attributed a score of 71 to the original video with the audio alone scoring over 90. Some creators told CNBC they welcome the opportunity to use Veo 3, even if it may have been trained on their content. "I try to treat it as friendly competition more so than these are adversaries," said Sam Beres, a creator with 10 million subscribers on YouTube. "I'm trying to do things positively because it is the inevitable —but it's kind of an exciting inevitable." Google includes an indemnification clause for its generative AI products, including Veo, which means that if a user faces a copyright challenge over AI-generated content, Google will take on legal responsibility and cover the associated costs. YouTube announced a partnership with Creative Artists Agency in December to develop access for top talent to identify and manage AI-generated content that features their likeness. YouTube also has a tool for creators to request a video to be taken down if they believe it abuses their likeness. However, Arrigoni said that the tool hasn't been reliable for his clients. YouTube also allows creators to opt out of third party training from select AI companies including Amazon, Apple and Nvidia, but users are not able to stop Google from training for its own models. The Walt Disney Company and Universal filed a joint lawsuit last Wednesday against the AI image generator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement, the first lawsuit of its kind out of Hollywood. "The people who are losing are the artists and the creators and the teenagers whose lives are upended," said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in May at a Senate hearing about the use of AI to replicate the likeness of humans. "We've got to give individuals powerful enforceable rights and their images in their property in their lives back again or this is just never going to stop."
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The New Nintendo Is Here. It's Missing Something Crucial That the Previous Ones Have All Had.
Of the many reasons Nintendo has flourished during its four-decade run in the video game industry—a Pixar-like dedication to quality, a memorable roster of mascots, an inherent creative brightness that cuts against the grimdark fantasies promulgated by other franchises—the company's prime advantage might be its commitment to affordability. The Nintendo Switch, a massively successful console that first made landfall in 2017, retailed for $299—a bargain compared with the $599 Xbox Series X and $699 PlayStation 5 Pro. Remember the Wii? The motion-controlled triumph that became all the rage in retirement homes during the mid-2000s? It was priced at $249, half as much as the lumbering PlayStation 3 which arrived one week prior. (It also included the eternal Wii Sports, bundled in the box, as a bonus.) It's a strategy that has sent an enduring message to consumers. Nintendo might not flex the same graphical fidelity of its rivals—Sony and Microsoft may consistently boast more impressive technical specs—but families could expect to save money when they purchased the company's hardware. And, frankly, that's what's been on my mind most as I surveyed the launch of Nintendo's latest console last week. The long-awaited Switch 2 is here, and it weighs in at an eye-popping $449. Its marquee launch title? A new Mario Kart game that costs an unprecedented $80. The Switch 2, it should be said, has an impressive design. Nintendo has outfitted the console with a gorgeous LCD screen, robust internal storage, and a motherboard powerful enough to furnish its lineup of games in glistening 4K. If you are one of the millions of people curious about the next installments of The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, or Animal Crossing, it is easy to consider its inflated price tag as a genuinely worthwhile investment in your future. And yet, like every other piece of video game machinery that has debuted this decade, the Switch 2 isn't going to shift any paradigms, because we are rapidly approaching a ceiling of what is possible with a graphics card. In the 1990s, each new console release represented a watershed moment in the industry. The Nintendo 64 arrived in 1996 with a suite of games rendered in 3D, leaps and bounds more impressive than the Super Nintendo, which imprisoned everything on-screen in a 2D plane. The justification for the cost was self-evident—a couple hundred bucks was more than worth it to unlock a whole new dimension. The Switch 2, meanwhile, functions essentially like a prettier, svelter, and more efficient update to the previous generation of hardware. The price is dramatically outpacing the novelty of the technology, and that discrepancy has been noticed by the gaming public. During the rollout of the Switch 2, when Nintendo hosted livestreams showcasing its upcoming 2025 catalog, the chat box on the side of the screen billowed up with the same message repeated ad nauseam: 'DROP THE PRICE.' It is hard to get a straight answer out of Nintendo about why its hardware has suddenly gotten so expensive, but it must be said that the company unveiled the Switch 2 on the afternoon of Donald Trump's so-called 'liberation day'—on which he announced a barrage of ill-conceived tariffs to be levied on the global population. Nintendo, recoiling from the chaos, briefly suspended preorders of its new consoles 'in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.' The announced price tag would eventually go unchanged, because Trump, as the saying goes, chickened out, but the impact may not be over: It wasn't long before Nintendo also warned of 'price adjustments' on accessories. The United States' self-inflicted financial uncertainty may also have already been factored into the Switch 2's retail calculus. That's certainly what industry analysts think. Joost van Dreunen, who studies the business of video games at New York University, told IGN in April that with the higher price, 'Nintendo appears to be building in a buffer against these potential trade barriers,' while Piers Harding-Rolls, who studies the gaming market at Ampere Analysis, speculated that the company 'probably had a range of pricing for the US market in play up until the last minute due to the uncertainty on import tariffs.' Nintendo, naturally, has remained publicly neutral about the issue. 'Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as a part of the cost and incorporate them into the price,' said Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa during a fiscal year report in May. (Given how open-ended Furukawa's statement was, I'm not surprised some experts believe that the Switch 2 might get even more expensive if Trump reintroduces portions of his tariff program, especially his original planned 46 percent tariff on Vietnam and 49 percent tariff on Cambodia, the countries where the company does much of its Switch manufacturing.) To be clear, Nintendo isn't the only heavy hitter jacking up its prices. Video game development is taking longer and growing steadily more expensive, and that has caused all the power brokers in the industry to print out new price tags. Just yesterday, Microsoft showed off The Outer Worlds 2, due out in October, which is a madcap sci-fi RPG that will also be the company's first $80 game. (For context, the average video game cost $60 for much of the 21st century. That number jumped to $70 in 2020, and five years later, norms are shifting again.) Similarly, remember that Xbox Series X I mentioned earlier? The one clocking in at $599? That's actually a recent phenomenon. When the console launched in 2020, it was a hundred bucks cheaper. The tech hasn't changed, but those ominous 'market conditions' certainly have, so Microsoft bumped up the cost earlier this year. This is a pretty radical departure, and it can't be explained away by simple inflation. Not long ago, video game hardware decreased in price over time, once it became sufficiently outpaced by flashier tech. But the titans of this industry have become increasingly responsive to fluctuations in the supply chain, and those old patterns have fallen by the wayside. The only question, it seems, that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are asking of their consumers is how much they're willing to pay. If that shift in philosophy turns their consoles into a luxury? Then so be it. Last weekend, I re-created a ritual I've savored every summer since I started playing video games. A few friends came over to fire up the latest Nintendo, down some beers, and enjoy a rousing evening of Mario Kart. The latest entry in the series hasn't altered the formula much; This is still the crowd-pleasing racing game it was in 1998, and 2007, and 2021. Gamers and nongamers alike instinctually internalized the controls, and together we jostled for position on the circuit, creating fleeting rivalries with those homing red shells. It left me a little melancholy. To think such a simple joy has become a premium experience? A new Mario Kart game is like manna from heaven for college dorms and bachelor pads. But today broke twentysomethings will need to scrounge up half a grand for the price of admission. I suppose that's just what life is like in 2025, when everything—rent, groceries, concert tickets, gym memberships—leaves us feeling gouged. No leisure goes unpunished anymore, and given the Trump economy's gloomy forecast, I fear it'll get worse before it gets better.
