A thorough investigation by 404 Media revealed that Runway's third-generation artificial intelligence model may have harvested thousands of YouTube videos without permission, including from official Nintendo channels.
News outlets have obtained a spreadsheet listing the targeted channels, including not only Nintendo but also big names such as Disney, Rockstar Games, Netflix, and Sony, some of which are highlighted in the image below by Nintendo Life.
Runway is backed by funding from both Google's parent company Alphabet and Nvidia, and its third-generation model received a fair bit of praise when it launched.
While 404 Media couldn't confirm whether all of the videos listed in the spreadsheet were scraped, it could prove that Runway intended to use the list of videos to train Gen-3. Statements from former Runway employees, who took the safe route of not revealing their identities, largely confirm that.
“The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build a model on. This was then used as input to a massive web crawler that downloaded every video from every channel, using proxies to get around Google's blocking.”
When reached for comment by 404, Google, which owns YouTube and is also involved in supporting Runway, said a statement it made earlier this year saying training an AI from YouTube videos violates the platform's rules still stands.
Even if Nintendo isn't directly affected or chooses not to go after Runway, other victims may not be so forgiving. And it's still not clear what role Google will play in all of this, as is the future of Gen-3 and all other AI generators like it.
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