AI Watchdog: Runway Gen-3

Explore original journalism about this data set through AI Watchdog, The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation into the generative-AI industry.

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Runway AI collected YouTube videos to train a video-generating AI model released as “Gen-3” in 2024. An internal company document that was obtained by 404 Media lists 3,967 YouTube channels that Runway identified as sources of high-quality video for training. The spreadsheet contains comments describing what is desirable about some of the channels, for example: “Beautiful cinematic landscapes”; “High quality scenes from movies”; “only 4 videos but they are really well done”; “super high quality sci-fi short films”; and “THE HOLY GRAIL OF CAR CINEMATICS SO FAR.”

It is not clear which, if any, videos Runway actually used for training its AI system. Our search tool includes all YouTube videos from the named channels that were published before May 17, 2024, which is one month before Runway introduced their model.