AI companies spend between £0.82 ($1) and £3.27 ($4) per minute on video footage, with prices varying based on quality and format.

It’s a major get for Murati’s mysterious startup, which has also poached engineers and researchers from a number of other prominent AI firms.

AI companies turned to social media content creators on platforms such as Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube as well as third-party licensing companies to gain access to unique content.

Generative artificial intelligence bellwether OpenAI said on Tuesday that it is introducing a beta feature called Tasks to ChatGPT, signaling the company's foray into the virtual assistant space, competing with Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

OpenAI and other firms' need for footage to train AI video generators has content creators selling them unused footage, but there are issues YouTubers and other digital content creators are selling their unused video footage to artificial intelligence companies seeking exclusive videos to better train their AI algorithms,