Nintendo now has a target for their infamous legal army, and I think we will all want to see Nintendo take this one down.
As reported by Nintendo Life, an AI company named Runway was caught training their AI model on Nintendo’s content. Runway has a generative AI to make videos called Gen-3.
Independent news outlet 404 media made an investigation of Runway. They got their hands onto a spreadsheet of YouTube channels and videos that were allegedly used to train Gen-3.
So, a lot of YouTubes of big companies were found in that spreadsheet, but some of Nintendo’s regional channels were found in the spreadsheet too.
An anonymous Runway employee shared this statement to 404 media:
“The channels in that spreadsheet were a company-wide effort to find good quality videos to build the model with. This was then used as input to a massive web crawler which downloaded all the videos from all those channels, using proxies to avoid getting blocked by Google.”
Somehow, the timing of this report couldn’t be better. Earlier this month, Nintendo went on record that they were not interested in using generative AI to help make their video games. Since we now know that other game companies have released and even sold content that had generative AI, this was a bold move on Nintendo’s part.
Of course, it must be said that Nintendo is in a better position to decide not to use generative AI than their Western peers. Nintendo has turned out to be exceedingly successful in this console generation, and that’s allowed them to retain and hire more creatives, for art, music, and other fields.
With all that said, we don’t have to ask if Nintendo would be willing to license their content to train generative AI. In this instance, they were not even asked properly by Runway. Clearly, this provocation is an invitation to get sued.
Unfortunately, AI is now the big topic in the video game industry for the day. We expect more game companies to admit their use of generative AI, and worse, some will be outed to have used it without disclosing it properly to the public, and especially their customers.
In the same way that Activision Blizzard won’t be the last game company we find out to be using generative AI without telling us, Nintendo will not be the last game company that AI companies will try to exploit, by using their content without their consent. We can only hope Nintendo makes an example of Runway.
