YouTube’s AI Training Argument Raises Alarm Among Indie Music Advocates: ‘Not Informed Consent’
Categoria: Musica
“I suspect if people aren’t angry about it, they don’t know about it,” says one creator advocate of YouTube potentially training AI on user content.
Por Billboard | 24/06/2026
YouTube has long been one of the most accessible ways for independent artists to get their music out into the world: Anyone can create an account and post content on the site with just a few clicks. But what many artists likely didn’t realize when they clicked “agree” to the platform’s terms of service is that YouTube, and its parent company Google, would later claim the agreement justifies training artificial intelligence models on their music. Google revealed this position in a legal filing earlier this month, obtained and reported by Billboard , as part of copyright litigation brought by indie artists over the training of its AI music model Lyria 3. While Google did not say whether the artists’ music from YouTube was in the Lyria 3 training data set, it argued that this theoretically would be allowed because the YouTube terms of service grant a “broad license to use the uploaded content” as training fodder. Related YouTube Terms of Service Allow AI Music Training, Google Says in Copyright Lawsuit Jack White's Wife Olivia Jean Files for Divorce After 4 Years of Marriage Kazumasa Izawa of JASRAC on Meeting the New Challenges of Japanese Music Worldwide: Billboard Global Power Players Interview This is markedly different from the argument made in court by companies behind other AI music models, such as Suno, that they should be free to train on unlicensed music ripped from the internet due to the fair use principle of copyright law. That’s because Google holds a distinctive position, as the owner of one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms, to make a novel legal argument that it actually does have a license to use everything on YouTube — thus skirting the fair use question altogether. Google’s new argument has quickly raised alarm bells among artist advocates, including Ian Harrison , CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM). “The use of anyone’s creative work should be consented to very clearly, the terms should be laid out and the value should be shared with the creators,” Harding tells Billboard . “That’s what’s so concerning about this issue [with Google]. It’s really the opposite of that.” Ron Gubitz , executive director of the Music Artists Coalition (MAC), is concerned that YouTube’s terms of service are too “generic” to properly put musicians on notice that their uploads could be used for AI training. Looking at the fine print, this contract states that YouTube and its affiliates have a worldwide, royalty-free license to use content on the platform to “reproduce, distribute [and] prepare derivative works.” The words “artificial intelligence” are not present, nor is the term “training.” And the terms of service cited by Google are from 2019, years before generative AI came to market. “Our take is this that this is not informed consent for AI training or output,” says Gubitz. “It was not written with AI training in mind. Consent should be specific and forward-looking, not using a checkbox from howeve