Tech
Google is training its AI tools on YouTube videos: These creators aren’t happy
Santa Ana, California-based entrepreneur Charlie Chang spent years posting finance videos on YouTube before he made a profit.
Today, Chang’s media business oversees more than 50 YouTube channels, along with other digital sites, and generates $3 million to $4 million in annual revenue, he said.
But lately, he’s been faced with a new concern: that YouTube’s moves in artificial intelligence will eat into his business.
“The fear is there, and I’m still building the channels, but I am preparing, just in case my channels become irrelevant,” Chang, 33, said. “I don’t know if I’m gonna be building YouTube channels forever.”
YouTube’s parent company, Google, is using a subset of the platform’s videos to train AI applications, including its text-to-video tool Veo. That includes videos made by users who have built their livelihoods on the service, helping turn it into the biggest streaming entertainment provider in the U.S.
The move has sparked deep tensions between the world’s biggest online video company and some of the creators who helped make it a behemoth. Google, creators say, is using their data to train something that could become their biggest competitor.
The schism comes at a pivotal time for Google, which is in a race with rivals including Meta, OpenAI and Runway for dominance in the market for AI-driven video programs. Google has an advantage due to YouTube’s huge video library, with more than 20 billion videos uploaded to its platform as of April.
Many creators worry such tools could make it easier for other people to replicate the style of their videos, by typing in text prompts that could produce images or concepts similar to what popular creators produce. What if AI-generated videos became more popular than their material? Creators say they can’t opt out of AI training and that Google does not compensate them for using videos for such purposes.
“It makes me sad, because I was a big part of this whole creator economy, and now, it’s literally being dismantled by the company that built it,” said Kathleen Grace, a former YouTube employee who is now chief strategy officer at Vermillio, a Chicago-based company that tracks people’s digital likenesses and intellectual property.
“I think they should be with pitchforks outside San Bruno.”
YouTube, founded in 2005, was built on creators posting content. At first, the user-generated videos were amateurish. But eventually, creators got more sophisticated and professional, doing more elaborate stunts and hiring staff to support their productions.
Key to YouTube’s early success was its investment in its video creators. The San Bruno, California-based company shares ad revenue with its creators, which can be huge. That business model has kept creators loyal to YouTube. As they grew their audiences, that in turn increased advertising revenue for both YouTube and creators.
Video creators are typically not employees of YouTube or Google. Many are independents who have built businesses by posting content, making money through ads, brand deals and merchandise.
The creator economy is a bright spot amid struggles in the entertainment industry. Last year, there were more than 490,000 jobs supported by YouTube’s creative ecosystem in the U.S., according to YouTube, citing data from Oxford Economics. YouTube has a greater share of U.S. TV viewership than Netflix and the combined channels of Walt Disney Co., according to Nielsen.
YouTube said it has paid more than $70 billion to creators, artists and media companies from 2021 to 2023.
The company has encouraged creators and filmmakers to use Google’s AI tools to help with brainstorming and creating videos, which could make them faster and more efficient. Some creators said they use AI to help hash out concepts, cut down on production costs and showcase bold ideas.
YouTube is also developing tools that will help identify and manage AI-generated content featuring creators’ likeness. Additionally, it made changes to its privacy policy for people to request removal of AI-generated content that simulates them on the platform, said company spokesman Jack Malon.
“YouTube only succeeds when creators do,” Malon said in a statement. “That partnership, which has delivered billions to the creator economy, is driven by continuous innovation—from the systems that power our recommendations to new AI tools. We’ve always used YouTube data to make these systems better, and we remain committed to building technology that expands opportunity, while leading the industry with safeguards against the misuse of AI.”
But already, creators say they are facing challenges from other people who are using AI to re-create their channels, cutting into their revenue and brand recognition.
“They’re training on things that we, the creators, are creating, but we’re not getting anything in return for the help that we are providing,” said Cory Williams, 44-year-old Oklahoma-based creator of Silly Crocodile, a popular animated character on YouTube.
In other cases, people are using AI to make deepfake versions of creators and falsely posing as them to message fans, said Vermillio’s Grace.
When people upload videos to YouTube, they agree to the company’s terms of service, which grants a royalty-free license to YouTube’s business and its affiliates.
But many creators said they were not aware YouTube videos were used to train Veo until they read about it in media reports. Melissa Hunter, chief executive of Family Video Network, a consulting firm for family-focused creators, said tools like Veo didn’t exist when she signed YouTube’s terms of service years ago.
Back in 2012, Hunter’s son (then 8 years old) wanted to start a YouTube channel together. Her son, now 22, is against AI for environmental reasons, so Hunter made those videos private. But Hunter said Google can still see those videos, and she’s concerned they were used to train Veo without her permission.
“It’s frustrating, and I don’t like it, but I also feel totally helpless to do anything,” Hunter said.
While there are other social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram that also support content creators, YouTubers say they have already built large audiences on Google’s platform and are reluctant to leave.
“Creators are in a tough spot where this is the best platform to make money … to build real loyal fans,” said Jake Tran, 27, who makes documentary YouTube videos on money, power, war and crime. “So are you going to give up just because Google is using it to train their AI?”
Last year, Tran’s YouTube business made around $1 million in revenue. Tran is also founder of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based skin-care business, Evil Goods, and together, his businesses employ 40 to 45 part-time and full-time workers.
Other AI companies, including Meta and OpenAI, have come under fire by copyright holders who have accused them of training AI models on their intellectual property. Disney and Universal Pictures sued AI business Midjourney in June for copyright infringement.
Tech industry executives have said that they should be able to train AI models with content available online under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder.
Some legal experts think creators might have a case if they decided to take their issue to court.
“There’s room to argue that simply by agreeing to the terms of service, they have not granted a license to YouTube or Google for AI training purposes, so that might be something that could be argued in the lawsuit,” said Mark Lezama, a partner at law firm Knobbe Martens. “There’s room to argue on both sides.”
Eugene Lee, CEO of ChannelMeter, a data and payments company for the creator economy, said he believes the only way creators can win is by using AI, not by fighting against it.
“Creators should absolutely embrace it and embrace it early, and embrace it as part of their production process, script generators, thumbnail generators—all these things that will require human labor to do in a massive amount of time and resources and capital,” Lee said.
Nate O’Brien, a Philadelphia creator who oversees YouTube channels about finance, estimates that his revenue will be flat or decline slightly, in part because it’ll be more challenging to get noticed on YouTube.
“It’s just a numbers game there,” O’Brien said. “But I think generally a person making a video would still perform better or rank better than an AI video right now. In a few more years, it might change.”
To prepare for the growth of AI content, O’Brien has been experimenting with using AI for videos on one of his channels, asking his assistant to take a script based on an existing video he made on a different channel and using AI to voice it. While the views have not outpaced the human-created videos, the AI-generated videos are lower in production cost. One garnered 5,000 views, 27-year-old O’Brien said.
Some creators have opted to share their video libraries with outside AI companies in exchange for compensation. For example, Salt Lake City YouTube creator Aaron de Azevedo, who oversees 20 YouTube channels, said he shared 30 terabytes of video footage in a deal with an AI company for roughly $9,000.
“There’s a good chunk of change,” De Azevedo, 40, said. “It was good, paid for most of my wedding.”
2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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Google is training its AI tools on YouTube videos: These creators aren’t happy (2025, August 29)
retrieved 29 August 2025
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The pulp and paper industry consumes large amounts of energy. But despite stricter EU requirements for efficiency improvements, there has been no way to measure and compare energy consumption between different companies in a fair way. In collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, now present a solution that has great potential to be used throughout the EU.
“Even if this would contribute to increasing efficiency by one or a few percent only, this involves so much energy that it can make a huge difference,” says Kristina Nyström, Ph.D. student at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University.
Globally, the pulp and paper industry accounts for 4% of energy used by the industrial sector. Through its Industrial Emissions Directive, the EU has set efficiency requirements for the industrial sector to reduce climate impact. An important tool for this is to make comparisons between factories within an industry—so-called benchmarking.
“But this has not been possible in the paper industry, because the mills have been so different that comparable results have not been achieved,” Kristina Nyström explains.
Therefore, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, assisted by Linköping University and Chalmers Industriteknik and in consultation with the paper industry, has developed a calculation method to enable comparisons. The method, which is presented in an article published in the journal Applied Energy, has great potential to be used throughout the EU, according to Olof Åkesson, former Swedish Environmental Protection Agency employee, who initiated the project.
The solution is to divide paper production into standardized processes such as actual pulp production, dissolution of purchased pulp, drying of pulp or paper production. These processes are common to enough mills for comparisons to be meaningful. In this way, companies can discover what in their processes works less efficiently compared to others, where improvements can be made and which actions would be most beneficial.
In addition, this method allows for more measures to be included in the energy efficiency efforts. One example is that companies are credited with the residual heat from manufacturing that is used in the surrounding community, such as the heating of homes or greenhouses.
Should this method gain ground, it could contribute to a changed approach to energy efficiency. At present, public agencies’ demands for energy audits often focus on details, which risks significant efficiency measures being overlooked.
“The benefit of making the pulp and paper industry more efficient is that this can reduce the use of fossil fuels and release raw materials, biofuels and electricity for other purposes,” says Åkesson.
With the involvement of researchers, public agencies and companies in the pulp and paper industry, chances are high that the method was designed in a way that is useful in practice. The collaboration between organizations can serve as a model for other industries wanting to develop their own measurement methods, according to Nyström.
Several companies that tested the measurement method have been positive, and it now needs to be spread and tested on a larger scale, the researchers say. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency is working to develop the model, now also in dialog with public agencies and the pulp and paper industry in Finland.
More information:
Olof Åkesson et al, A calculation method enabling energy benchmarking in the pulp and paper industry: Adopting a methodology that bridge the research–policy implementation gap, Applied Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.126685
Citation:
Paper industry could become more energy-efficient with a new measurement method (2025, October 16)
retrieved 16 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-paper-industry-energy-efficient-method.html
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Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That’s especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.
The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk that could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.
“The aviation sector—a fast-growing source of greenhouse gases—illustrates the broader challenge of industrial decarbonization: too little investment in technologies that could yield the biggest climate benefits,” said the paper’s co-author David G. Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative.
The piece outlines a new approach that could help guide a coalition of research and development (R&D) programs alongside investors and airlines seeking to deploy new technologies to curb carbon emissions from the aviation industry.
“Despite all the chaos in global geopolitics and climate policies these days, there are large and growing pools of capital willing to take risks on clean technology,” Victor said. “What’s been missing is a framework to guide that capital to the riskiest but most transformative investments.”
He added that investors and research managers tend to focus on familiar, lower-risk projects like next-generation jet engines or recycled-fuel pathways.
“But getting aviation and other hard-to-abate sectors to near-zero emissions means taking on bigger risks with technologies and new lines of business that will be highly disruptive to the existing industry. Investors and airlines need to find smarter ways to encourage and manage these disruptive investments,” Victor said.
In the article, Victor and co-authors call for a more realistic framework to guide both research funding and private investment.
They propose a tool called an Aviation Sustainability Index (ASI)—a quantitative method to assess how different technologies or investments could help decouple emissions from growth in air travel.
The approach is designed to help investors distinguish between projects that only modestly improve efficiency and those that could significantly transform the sector’s climate impact.
The authors note that while roughly $1 trillion is expected to flow into aviation over the next decade, most of that money will simply make aircraft slightly more efficient. Few investors, they argue, have clear incentives to back the kind of breakthrough technologies—such as hydrogen propulsion, advanced aircraft designs, or large-scale sustainable fuel systems—that could substantially reduce emissions.
“Cleaner flight is possible, but it requires changing how we think about both risk and return,” Victor said. “We need new institutions, incentives, and partnerships that reward innovation, not just incrementalism.”
The commentary, written by a multinational team of scholars, also highlights a broader lesson for climate policy: global decarbonization goals such as “net zero by 2050” sound bold and ambitious. But when it becomes clear that they can’t be met, these goals make it harder to focus on the practical steps needed today to drive change in real-world markets.
Ultimately, the paper argues for action that begins now. By developing better tools to evaluate climate-friendly investments and by rewarding companies willing to take calculated risks on breakthrough technologies, governments, investors and industry leaders can accelerate real progress toward decarbonization.
The paper was co-authored by Thomas Conlon of University College Dublin, Philipp Goedeking of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany) and Andreas W. Schäfer of University College London.
More information:
David G. Victor et al, Mobilizing capital and technology for a clean aviation industry, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu2458. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu2458
Citation:
Researchers chart path for investors to build a cleaner aviation industry (2025, October 16)
retrieved 16 October 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-path-investors-cleaner-aviation-industry.html
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part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, “Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?”
OK now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. That’s the vision for a new capability created for the Niantic Labs AR experience Peridot.
Niantic, also the developer of the worldwide AR behemoth Pokémon Go, hopes to build out its vision of extending the metaverse into the real world by giving people the means to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that lets users customize and interact with their own little Dots—dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone’s screen and can look like they’re interacting with the world objects in the view of your camera lens. They’re very cute, and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now, they can talk.
Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then got infused with generative AI features. The game has since moved into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup created in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot Beyond, it has been enabled in Snap’s Spectacles.
Hume AI, a startup running a large language model that aims to make chatbots seem more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to bring a voice to the Dots on Snap’s Spectacles. The move was initially announced in September, but now it’s ready for the public and will be demonstrated at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event this week.
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