NEW DELHI: Sam Altman-run OpenAI transcribed more than a million hours of YouTube videos to train its AI model called GPT-4, a report has claimed.

The New York Times reported that OpenAI knew this was not legal but “believed it to be fair use”.

“OpenAI president Greg Brockman was personally involved in collecting videos that were used,” according to the report.

An OpenAI spokesperson told The Verge that the company uses “numerous sources including publicly available data and partnerships for non-public data,” to maintain its global research competitiveness.

Google, which owns YouTube, said it has “seen unconfirmed reports” of OpenAI’s activity.

“Both our robots.txt files and Terms of Service prohibit unauthorised scraping or downloading of YouTube content,” the tech giant maintained.

Last year, The Information reported for the first time that OpenAI, which is now backed by Microsoft, trained its AI models on Google-owned YouTube by scrapping its data.

OpenAI "secretly used data from the site (YouTube) to train some of its artificial intelligence models".

YouTube is the single biggest and richest source of imagery, audio and text transcripts on the web.