YouTubers Accuse Apple of Secretly Using Their Videos to Train AI

Three YouTubers have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally scraping millions of YouTube videos to train its AI models.

The complaint says Apple used a large video dataset tied to YouTube content without permission or payment to creators. It focuses on a research project that claims to have used a dataset called Panda-70M, which links to millions of YouTube videos that Apple allegedly downloaded and processed for internal AI training.

The plaintiffs are Ted Entertainment LLC, which runs the h3h3 Productions channel, Matt Fisher of MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics LLC. Together, they say hundreds of their videos appear in the Panda-70M dataset. This, the complaint alleges, violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by bypassing YouTube's controls that prevent automated scraping and downloading of content.

The lawsuit asks a California federal court to recognize a group of YouTube creators affected by the alleged unauthorized use of their ...