Not only will Google admit that it feeds YouTube creators its music AI

If you upload a song to YouTube, Google will almost certainly consider your video fair game for Lyria AI music training, but it won’t admit that now.

Their lawsuit is based on the unsupported premise that Google coached their specific business. Even accepting their untested claims as fact, the complaint cannot stand. Both the plaintiffs granted YouTube and Google — which provides the service — a broad license to use the uploaded content. This license, found in YouTube’s Terms of Service, authorized the conduct alleged in the complaint.

This is the standard hedge for filing a legal claim: “You can’t prove that we did it, and even if we did, we’re allowed to do it.” When asked directly whether Google uses YouTube videos to train its Lyria 3 AI music model, the company declined to comment. But based on previous public statements, it seems safe to assume that the answer is yes.

In an interview from April 2024 with BloombergYouTube CEO Neil Mohan said that “some portion” of YouTube videos could be used internally to train models like Gemini. Later that year, A.J Blog post This was confirmed around Creator Tools, saying “We use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.”

The company even confirmed this CNBC She was using YouTube uploads to train Gemini and Veo. What Google hasn’t done is specifically confirm that it also uses YouTube uploads to train Lyria.

However, in its motion to dismiss, Google says that by uploading content directly to YouTube, the plaintiffs agreed to its terms of service, which give the company the right to “reproduce, distribute, (and) prepare derivative works of” based on the upload.

With all that in mind, it might seem strange that Google wouldn’t just acknowledge the obvious. But for now, the company doesn’t have much to gain by signing up. With lawsuits pending, maintaining plausible deniability is a calculated move.