Runway’s AI video generator trained on thousands of videos scraped from YouTube

Runway trained its AI text-to-video generator on thousands of YouTube videos and pirated movies, according to a report of 404 Media. A training data spreadsheet obtained by the media outlet includes links to YouTube channels belonging to major entertainment companies such as Netflix, Disney, Nintendo and Rockstar Games, as well as creators such as MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips and Sam Kolder.

There are also links to channels owned by news agencies such as On the edge, The New Yorker, ReutersIt is Wired. “The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build the model,” said a former Runway employee. 404 Media. “This was then used as input to a huge web crawler that downloaded all the videos from all these channels, using proxies to avoid being blocked by Google.”

Runway is an AI startup that has received millions in funding from the parent company of Google, Alphabet and Nvidia. He has created impressive tools that allow users to create realistic-looking AI videos, as well as those that capture a specific type of animation. Runway’s latest tool, Generation 3 Alpha, launched in June and can “create videos in any style you can imagine.” Like other AI models, Gen-3 Alpha needs to ingest a variety of content during training.

In addition to YouTube channels, 404 Media also found that the Runway dataset contains links to piracy sites like KissCartoon, which allows you to watch anime and other animated content for free. It’s not yet clear whether Runway used all the videos in this spreadsheet to train its Gen-3 Alpha model — and we may never find out. In an interview with TechCrunch In June, Runway co-founder Anastasis Germanidis said the company uses “curated internal datasets” to train its models, but did not provide further details.

When contacted for comment, Google pointed out On the edge to a statement from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who said Bloomberg in April that training AI on the platform’s videos is a “clear violation” of its policies. On the edge reached out to Runway with a request for comment but did not immediately receive a response.