YouTube allows creators to opt-in to third-party AI training

YouTube allows creators to allow third-party companies to apply their videos to train artificial intelligence models. To be clear, the default setting is disabled, which means that if you don’t want third-party companies downloading your videos for AI training, you don’t need to do anything. But if for some reason you Down you want to allow this – Google says that “some creators and rights holders” may want this – this will be one of the options.

“We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them discover new value in YouTube content in the era of AI,” says TeamYouTube employee Rob. in the support post. “As we gather feedback, we will continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods of accessing content.”

YouTube will roll out this setting to YouTube Studio “over the next few days,” and unauthorized downloads “will remain prohibited,” Rob writes.

Other support page says you will be able to choose from the list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simply enable all external companies to train on them. The initial list of companies includes, among others: According to TechCrunch: :

AI21 Labs, Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, ByteDance, Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Perplexity, Pika Labs, Runway, Stability AI and xAI.

This is what YouTube spokesman Jack Malon says Edge This TechCrunch the list is precise. “These companies were selected because they build generative AI models and are likely to be a reasonable choice for potential partnerships with creators,” says Malon.

This announcement follows reports of AI models from huge companies – including OpenAI, Apple and Anthropic – being trained on content and datasets pulled from YouTube. Google itself already uses YouTube data to train its AI tools. “We have been using content uploaded to YouTube for many years to improve the experience for creators and viewers on YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI-powered applications,” the company said in Septemberwhen it was announced that this feature was coming. “We do this according to the terms that the creators agree to.”