A popular and powerful text-to-video AI generator developed by Runway was trained on copious amounts of pirated content and ripped off YouTube videos, according to a gigantic internal spreadsheet obtained by 404 Media. Last month, the company’s Gen-3 Alpha video generation tool drew huge amounts of attention, with publications — including Futurism — lauding the almost photorealistic clips it could generate. At the time, Runway claimed that Gen-3 Alpha was “trained jointly on videos and images,” but stopped far short of elaborating on the source of the data. Now, according to the document obtained by 404 Media, there may be a good reason for that coyness. The spreadsheet is chock full of popular content drawn from major YouTube channels, including those belonging to Disney, Netflix, and Sony, in addition to links to websites that are known to host pirated content. Well well well. Runway AI video generator was trained on YouTube videos without permission, including 1600+ MKBHD videos https://t.co/U4s5KIq1XZ — Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) July 25, 2024 While 404 Media couldn’t confirm that Gen-3 Alpha was trained on all of the listed assets, it seems circumstantially very likely — and, as such, a striking new piece of evidence that AI companies are shamelessly stealing content to feed AI models with a complete disregard for copyright — a consistently recurring pain point in the world of generative AI. While questions remain as to which videos actually made it into the training data, 404 Media was effortlessly able to generate believable videos of…Leak Shows That Google-Funded AI Video Generator Runway Was Trained on Stolen YouTube Content, Pirated Films