OpenAI and Google reportedly used transcriptions of YouTube videos to train their AI models

People have been used to a lot of private services for a while now. YouTube is so ubiquitous it's almost like a utility, in that everyone always has access to it and it's just everywhere, with no real competitor.

But all of these social media services are private, so as much as they feel like public information utilities, once you're on one, your data isn't your own. I think that's the disconnect when people hear that "their data" has been used for AI training. It ceased to be their data as soon as it went on the platform, at least tacitly in the US.

There has traditionally been a public expectation of control that simply isn't there for any of these services. The industry knows this and capitalizes on it regularly. It's a key tenet of technofeudalism.