SoftwareAIA leaked document indicates Runway’s Gen-3 AI video generation tool may have been trained on YouTube videos and copyrighted content without permissionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
SoftwareAIA leaked document indicates Runway’s Gen-3 AI video generation tool may have been trained on YouTube videos and copyrighted content without permissionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

Here’s a question that can throw a generative AI company into a twist: “What content has been used to train your models?” While some opt to dodge the question, and othersbullishly front out the issueentirely, the question of whether an AI company has scraped content for its own business purposes without permission is a thorny one.
At best, you’re likely to get a mealy-mouthed explanation of"curated datasets", and at worst, a polemic about whethereverything on the internet is essentially fair game.
While 404media doesn’t go into details as to how the document was obtained, nor could it verify that every video mentioned within was used to train Gen-3, it’s potentially an insight into the sort of practices that an AI company might use to scrape copyrighted material to train its models.
A former Runway employee spoke to 404media about the methodology involved. The 14 spreadsheets contained within the leaked document are said to feature terms like “beach” or “rain”, with the names of Runway employees next to them.
It’s not just YouTube content that looks to have been scraped, either. A spreadsheet containing 14 links to non-YouTube sources, including a link to a website dedicated to streaming popular cartoons and animated movies, with thousands of copyright complaints logged against it.
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Essentially, pirated media looks to have been at least under consideration for training data, if not directly scraped and used.
AI, explained(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.
AI, explained
(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.
(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

What is artificial general intelligence?:We dive into the lingo of AI and what the terms actually mean.
404media actually went one step further, and attempted to use Gen-3 to generate video using prompts that contained keywords based on the terms found in the spreadsheet, and was able to create clips that looked to be very much in the same style as the associated content.
Still, while the issue of AI content theft is a thorny one, the model does still appear to have issues. Ars Technica tried creating some videos recently with Gen-3 Alpha,and it gave a cat a pair of human hands. I’m not sure what content was used to train that particular version of the model, but I’d suggest that no matter the methodology used here, it could do with some work one way or the other.
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