OpenAI to Launch Media Manager Tool for Creators in 2025

Published 4 months ago

OpenAI is set to launch a new tool called “Media Manager” in 2025. This tool will give creators the ability to select which of their works they permit to be used by the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models for training, according to a blog post on the OpenAI website.

Media Manager: A Tool for Creators

The Media Manager tool will enable creators and content owners to state their ownership and specify how their works should be included or excluded from machine learning research and training. The plan is to introduce more options and features over time.

The tool will necessitate advanced machine learning research to build a first-ever tool of its kind. It will help identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video across multiple sources, and reflect creator preferences.

Collaborations and Goals

OpenAI is working with creators, content owners, and regulators in the development of Media Manager. The objective is to have the tool ready by 2025, with hopes that it will set a benchmark in the AI industry. The price of the tool has not been revealed yet.

The Need for Media Manager

Media Manager is designed to provide creators with additional protections for AI data scraping beyond the addition of a string of code to the robots.txt file on their websites. This measure, introduced by OpenAI in August 2023, is not sufficient as many creators post work on sites they don’t own or control, such as DeviantArt or Patreon.

The new tool will allow creators to exempt specific works from AI data scraping and training, offering more granular control and optionality. OpenAI acknowledges the need for an efficient, scalable solution for content owners to express their preferences about the use of their content in AI systems.

The development of Media Manager comes amidst visual artists and creators voicing objections against AI model makers like OpenAI and its rivals for web scraping without their express permission, consent, or compensation. Several creators have filed class action lawsuits against OpenAI and other AI companies for alleged copyright violation.

OpenAI’s stance is that web crawling and scraping is a standard practice across many companies, hence it is attempting to position itself as a cooperative and ethical entity with respect to creators and its data sources.

However, the company’s offer of indemnification for subscribers to its paid plans accused of copyright infringement is seen as an attempt to reassure its growing list of enterprise customers. The courts have yet to make a decisive ruling on whether AI companies can scrape copyrighted creative works without the express consent of the creators.

The Company’s Position

OpenAI argues that it does not preserve copies of scraped data wholesale, only “an equation that best describes the relationship among the words and the underlying process that produced them.” The company designs its AI models to generate new content and ideas, not to repeat content.

The Media Manager tool may serve as a more efficient and user-friendly way to block AI training than existing options. However, its acceptance and trust among creators remain to be seen.