YouTube has begun developing new tools to protect artists and authors from unauthorized use of their appearance and voice.
The company announced about creating technologies that can detect content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) using someone else’s face or voice.
The first tool, which YouTube has dubbed «Synthetic Singing Identification Technology», will allow artists and creators to automatically detect and manage content on the platform that mimics their voice using generative AI. This technology will part of the Content ID system — YouTube’s automated intellectual property protection system. The company plans to start piloting this tool next year.
YouTube continues to fulfill its promise from November last year. At the time, the platform promised to allow music labels to remove AI copies of artists’ voices. The rapid development and availability of generative AI tools for music creation has raised concerns among artists about their use for plagiarism and copyright infringement. Earlier this year, more than 200 artists, including Billy Eilish, Pearl Jam, and Katy Perry, in open letter called unauthorized AI-generated copying «an attack on human creativity» and demanded more responsibility for its development to protect the earnings of performers.
At the same time, YouTube is developing a separate tool to detect the duplicate identities of creators, actors, musicians, and athletes on the platform. This system is still under active development, and YouTube has not yet announced the expected timeline for its implementation.
YouTube is also committed to cracking down on those who use the platform to create AI tools without permission.
«We have made it clear that unauthorized access to creator content violates our Terms of Service», — the platform noted.
This hasn’t stopped companies like OpenAI, Apple, Anthropic, Nvidia, Salesforce, and Runway AI from training their AI systems on thousands of uploaded YouTube videos. To protect against such activities, YouTube will block scrapers’ access to the platform and invest in scraping detection systems
Scraping (from the English word «scraping» — scrape, scrape) — is an automated process of collecting data from websites or other digital sources..
Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of creator products, said:
«We believe that AI should enhance human creativity, not replace it. We are committed to working with our partners to ensure that future advances amplify their voices, and will continue to develop safeguards to solve problems and achieve common goals».
YouTube also announces that it is developing ways to give creators more choice over how third-party AI companies can use their content on the platform. More information on this will be released later this year.
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