Good morning,
Yesterday, the European Commission threw itself into the messy waters of AI-training data by probing Google for using YouTube content for AI training, as part of its investigation into potential antitrust violations.
This YouTube probe is different from the antitrust case started against Facebook's parent company Meta last week. Meta’s case is about customers' access to choice, YouTube’s is about a company's access to data.
Data has become unbelievably valuable ("the new oil", etc) in the great race to hoover up as much as possible to create the best chatbot or video generator ever.
In 2024, Google spent $60m [€51.5m] on a licensing deal with internet forum website Reddit for access to user data, and OpenAI signed a $250m agreement with media giant News Corp to use its articles in its systems.
The name of the global AI game, which the UN expects to be valued at $4.8 trillion by 2033, is what data your company has within its walled garden to mash together when someone asks the chatbot, “draw me a picture of my dog in jeans,” or “ help me write an essay about the French Revolution.”
And YouTube is sitting on a data goldmine of around 14 billion videos.
One may say the European Commission has an admirable goal: companies should not use data without consent and give “appropriate compensation” to the people who supply it. But it's going to be an uphill battle, with the US so hostile to foreign regulation and Big Tech unlikely to change their data-driven business model for the sake of yet another probe.
– Owen Carpenter-Zehe, tech reporter
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