A group of prominent YouTubers has filed a lawsuit against Snap, accusing the company of using their videos without their consent to train the AI systems that power Snapchat’s features, expanding their legal battle against the artificial intelligence developer.
The proposed class action lawsuit was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by Internet content creators whose three YouTube channels collectively have more than 6.2 million subscribers. The plaintiffs allege that Snap trained its AI models using its own video content, which was allegedly harvested from YouTube in violation of the platform’s rules and copyright protections.
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According to the complaint, Snap used large video language datasets created solely for academic and research purposes, including a dataset known as HD-VILA-100M. The creators allege that Snap reused these datasets for commercial AI development, circumventing YouTube’s technical safeguards, terms of service, and licensing restrictions that prohibit such use.
The lawsuit alleges that the scraped content was used to support Snapchat AI features such as “Imagine Lens,” a tool that allows users to edit images using text-based prompts. Plaintiffs allege that the copyrighted videos were exploited to generate commercial value without permission or compensation.
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The lawsuit is led by the creators of the h3h3 Productions YouTube channel, which has over 5.5 million subscribers, and the creators of the MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics channels. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages and a permanent injunction preventing the content from being used in future AI training.
Snap is the latest company to be added to the list of defendants in a similar lawsuit brought by the same creator group. Plaintiffs previously sued Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance for exploiting copyrighted video content to develop AI.
The case adds broader legal scrutiny to how AI companies source training data. Content creators, publishers, artists, writers, and news organizations are increasingly challenging AI companies over the use of their copyrighted material. According to the nonprofit Copyright Alliance, more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against AI companies.
Courts have produced mixed results so far. In some cases, judges have ruled in favor of technology companies, and in others, AI developers have reached settlements with rights holders. Many of the lawsuits remain unresolved, and important legal questions regarding copyright, fair use, and AI training practices remain unresolved.
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