Snap just became the latest tech giant dragged into court over AI training practices. A group of YouTubers with 6.2 million combined subscribers filed a proposed class action lawsuit on Friday, alleging the social media company scraped their videos without permission to power AI features like Imagine Lens. The case adds Snap to a growing list of defendants that already includes Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance, as content creators push back against what they see as wholesale theft of their work.
Snap is facing a fresh legal battle over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. A group of YouTube content creators filed a proposed class action lawsuit in California federal court on Friday, alleging the company scraped their videos without permission to build AI-powered features that now generate revenue for the platform.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, centers on Snap's use of the HD-VILA-100M dataset - a massive collection of video-language pairs that was explicitly designed for academic and research purposes only. The plaintiffs claim Snap violated YouTube's terms of service, circumvented technological protections, and ignored licensing restrictions that prohibit commercial use of such datasets.
The case is led by the creators behind the popular h3h3 YouTube channel, which boasts 5.52 million subscribers, along with two smaller golf-focused channels, MrShortGame Golf and Golfoholics. Together, the trio represents roughly 6.2 million collective subscribers whose content allegedly ended up training Snap's AI systems without compensation or consent.
At the heart of the complaint is Snap's Imagine Lens feature, which lets users edit images using text prompts. According to the plaintiffs, this commercial AI tool was built on the backs of their copyrighted video content, extracted through datasets that were never meant to leave the lab. The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and a permanent injunction to halt what the creators characterize as ongoing copyright infringement.
