YouTubers Sue Amazon, Claim AI Tool Was Trained on Scraped Videos

With more than a decade of experience, Nelson covers Apple and Google and writes about iPhone and Android features, privacy and security settings, and more.

A group of YouTube creators is suing Amazon, accusing the tech giant of secretly scraping their videos to train its AI video model without permission.

The proposed class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Seattle, alleges Amazon used automated tools to download and extract data from millions of YouTube videos to build and improve its Nova Reel generative AI system -- a model that can create short videos from text prompts and images. 

At the center of the complaint is how that data was obtained. The plaintiffs claim that Amazon bypassed YouTube's protections using virtual machines and rotating IP addresses to avoid detection, effectively sidestepping the platform's safeguards against bulk downloading. 

The lawsuit was brought by several creators, including ...