YouTube recently announced a new feature that allows creators to choose whether to permit third-party companies to use their videos for the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The default setting for this option is off, meaning that if creators don't want third-party companies to scrape their videos for AI training, they don't need to take any action. However, if creators wish to do so, YouTube will provide a clear option.

Rob, a member of the YouTube team, said in a support post: "We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era." He also mentioned that YouTube will continue to explore new ways to facilitate cooperation between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorizing access to content.

This setting will be gradually rolled out to YouTube Studio in the next few days, and unauthorized scraping remains prohibited. According to information on another support page, creators can choose from a list of third-party companies which ones are allowed to use their videos for training, or choose to allow all third-party companies to do so. According to TechCrunch's report, the initially listed companies include: AI21Labs, Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, ByteDance, Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Perplexity, Pika Labs, Runway, Stability AI and xAI.

YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon confirmed the accuracy of the list of companies listed by TechCrunch to The Verge. He said that these companies were chosen because they are building generative AI models and the potential cooperative relationships with creators are quite reasonable.

This announcement came after reports that major companies (including OpenAI, Apple and Anthropic) used content and datasets scraped from YouTube for AI model training. Google itself has already used YouTube's data to help train its AI tools. When the company announced in September that this feature was under development, it said: "As we have done for many years, we use the content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers on YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications." They emphasized that this practice is consistent with the terms agreed upon by creators.