When Jon Peters uploaded his first video to YouTube in 2010, he had no idea where it would lead.
He was a professional woodworker running a small business who decided to film himself making a dining table with some old legs he had found in a barn. It turned out that people liked his candid style, and as he posted more videos, a fan base began to grow. “All of a sudden there’s people who appreciate the work I’m doing,” he told me.
“The comments were a motivator.” Fifteen years later, his channel has more than 1 million subscribers. Sometimes he gets photos of people in their shops, following his guidance from a big TV on the wall—most of his viewers, Peters told me, are woodworkers looking to him for instruction.
But Peters’s channel could soon be obsolete, along with millions of other videos created by people who share their expertise and advice on YouTube.
Over the past few months, I’ve discovered more than 15.8 million videos from more than 2 million channels that tech companies have, without permission, downloaded to train AI products.
Nearly 1 million of them, by my count, are how-to videos. You can find these videos in at least 13 different data sets distributed by AI developers at tech companies, universities, and research organizations, through websites such as Hugging Face, an online AI-development hub.
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