January 2, 2025
OpenAI failed to deliver on its promise to offer an opt-out option by 2025. The company said in May that it was working on the Media Manager tool, which would give creators the power to decide which of their creations are included in its AI training datasets. Seven months later, the tool supposed to help resolve intellectual property issues and appease critics has not been released.
According to insiders who spoke to TechCrunch, internal development of the tool was not a top priority. A coordinator who works with OpenAI pointed out the lack of recent updates, and a former employee admitted that he had seen almost no progress. Fred von Lohmann, a member of the tool's legal team, even took up a part-time consulting position.
OpenAI did not provide any updates regarding the development or upcoming release of Media Manager, which was intended to help manage the complex intellectual property environment that AI models must navigate. These models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, learn from massive data sets and can generate content that closely resembles the original data, potentially leading to lawsuits from the producers.
Ad hoc opt-out techniques are already available through OpenAI, although developers criticize them as insufficient. The goal of the new tool was to expand these choices and offer a more comprehensive solution for opt-out procedures and content ownership.
Experts doubt whether Media Manager could successfully resolve these issues if introduced. They argue that the tool might not significantly reduce legal issues or meet content protection and payment requirements, implying that authors would be unfairly burdened with managing AI training.
The significance of Media Manager in legal circumstances is still unknown as OpenAI is still subject to lawsuits and dependent on fair use defenses. The tool is not intended to provide a complete answer to the intellectual property issues associated with training AI models; rather, it is a public relations attempt to establish OpenAI as a user of ethical content.
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