A thorough investigation by 404 Media revealed that Runway’s Gen-3 AI model may have downloaded thousands of YouTube videos without permission, including several from official Nintendo channels.
The tech reporting outlet obtained a spreadsheet listing the channels that were targeted – and Nintendo wasn’t the only big name out there, with Disney, Rockstar Games, Netflix and Sony also affected. Part of that is shown in the image below, highlighted by Nintendo Life:
Runway received both financial and in-kind support from Alphabet – Google’s parent company – as well as Nvidia, and its Gen-3 model received significant praise at launch.
While 404 Media could not confirm whether every single video listed in the spreadsheet was hacked, it was able to prove that Runway intended to use the video list to train Gen-3. A statement from a former Runway employee, whose identity is being withheld for their security, almost confirmed it:
“The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality video to build the models. This was then used as input to a massive web crawler that downloaded all the videos from all those channels, using proxies to avoid being blocked by Google.”
When 404 was asked for comment, Google, which owns YouTube and is involved in supporting Runway, said that their statement earlier this year, which said that AI trained using YouTube videos was a violation of the platform’s rules, still stands.
Even if Nintendo wasn’t directly affected, or chose not to pursue Runway, other victims may not be so forgiving. And what role Google will play in all this remains to be determined – as does the future of Gen-3 and all other generative AIs like it.
