Big Tech is trapped in a glass house on AI data snatching

A FEW weeks ago, Mira Murati, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, was asked if her company had used YouTube videos to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

First, she gave a blank stare. Then there was a grimace. Finally, she gave an answer that avoided the messy and furtive world she and other tech companies were operating in: “Actually, I’m not sure about that.”

According to a report by The New York Times, OpenAI in fact had trained its AI on “more than one million hours of YouTube videos”, using a speech recognition tool called Whisper. All the conversational text from the transcriptions was used to train GPT-4, the flagship large language model that underpins ChatGPT.