OpenAI says that it’s developing a tool to let creators better control how their content is used in generative AI.
Called Media Manager, the tool — once it’s released — will allow creators and content owners to identify their works to OpenAI and specify how they want those works to be included or excluded from AI research and training. The goal is to have the tool in place by 2025, OpenAI says, as the company works with creators, content owners and regulators toward a common standard.
“This will require cutting-edge machine learning research to build a first-ever tool of its kind to help us identify copyrighted text, images, audio and video across multiple sources and reflect creator preferences,” OpenAI writes in a blog post. “Over time, we plan to introduce additional choices and features.”
It’d seem Media Manager, whatever form it ultimately takes, is OpenAI’s response to growing criticism of its approach to developing AI, which relies heavily on scraping public data available from the web. Most recently, eight prominent U.S. newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel sued OpenAI for IP infringement relating to the companies’ use of generative AI.
Generative AI models including OpenAI’s — the sorts of models that can analyze and generate text, images, videos and more — are trained on an enormous number of examples usually sourced from public websites and data sets. Generative AI vendors claim that the fair use doctrine protects them in the event that a model was knowingly or unknowingly developed on copyrighted content, but not everyone agrees