YouTubers sue Snap for alleged copyright infringement in training its AI models

A group of YouTubers who are suing tech giants for scraping their videos without permission to train AI models has now added Snap to their list of defendants. The plaintiffs — internet content creators behind a trio of YouTube channels with roughly 6.2 million collective subscribers — allege that Snap has trained its AI systems on their video content for use in AI features like the app’s “Imagine Lens,” which allows users to edit images using text prompts.

The plaintiffs earlier filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance over similar matters.

In the newly filed proposed class action suit, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the YouTubers specifically call out Snap for its use of a large-scale, video-language data set known as HD-VILA-100M, and others that were designed for only academic and research purposes. To use these datasets for commercial purposes, the plaintiffs claim Snap circumvented YouTube’s technological restrictions, terms of service, and licensing limitations, which prohibit commercial use.

The suit is seeking statutory damages and a permanent injunction to stop the alleged copyright infringement going forward.

The case itself is being led by the creators behind the h3h3 YouTube channel, with 5.52 million subscribers, and the smaller golfing channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfoholics.

It’s now one of many lawsuits pitting content creators against AI model providers, which have included copyright disputes from publishers, authors, newspapers, user-generated content sites, artists, and more. It’s also not the first case to hail from a YouTuber. According to the non-profit organization Copyright Alliance, over 70 copyright infringement cases have been filed against AI companies.

In some cases, like one between Meta and a group of authors, a judge has ruled in favor of the tech giant. In others, like the case between Anthropic and a group of authors, the AI giant has settled with and paid out the plaintiffs to resolve their claims. Many cases are still in active litigation.

Snap was asked for comment. TechCrunch will update if one is provided.