OpenAI's Promised Copyright Protection Tool for Creators Faces Delays and Uncertainty

OpenAI Fails to Deliver Opt-Out System for Photographers

OpenAI has missed its own 2025 deadline on a tool it said would allow photographers to exclude their work from the company's training data. Back in May, OpenAI revealed it was working on a tool called Media Manager that would "identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video." The proposed program was intended to quell some of the company's criticisms and potentially shield it from its many copyright disputes. But news about Media Manager is non-existent with one former OpenAI employee telling TechCrunch they don't believe it was a priority for the company. "To be honest, I don't remember anyone working on it," the anonymous employee says. After DALL-E 3 was announced, OpenAI's image generator, the company announced that photographers could opt out of AI training data. "We understand that some content owners may not want their publicly available works used to help teach our models," OpenAI said at the time. But photographers had to submit each piece of work they wanted excluding along with detailed descriptions, a cumbersome process. Similarly, Media Manager would also put the onus on creators to remove their work, something that Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of Fairly Trade, says is unfair. "Most creators will never even hear about it, let alone use it," he tells TechCrunch. "But it will nevertheless be used to defend the mass exploitation of creative work against creators' wishes." AI and training data is an extremely thorny issue with many photographers and content creators of all stripes feeling aggrieved that their work is being used to build products without ever giving permission or being remunerated. Media Manager was initially pitched as a way to sort out these problems and offer photographers an easy way to opt-out. But despite setting itself a deadline of "by 2025", OpenAI has stopped mentioning Media Manager altogether. The last update was in August when a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the tool was "still in development." An IP attorney tells TechCrunch that Media Manager is an ambitious project; noting that large platforms like YouTube and TikTok struggle with content ID systems. "Ensuring compliance with legally required creator protections and potential compensation requirements under consideration presents challenges," says Andrian Cyhan from Stubbs Alderton & Markiles. "Especially given the rapidly evolving and potentially divergent legal landscape across national and local jurisdictions."

Is OpenAI's promised copyright protection stalled for good?

According to an exclusive TechCrunch article, OpenAI has not delivered the promised 'Media Manager' opt-out tool, which was teased in May 2024 to enable creators and content owners to prevent their works from being used in AI training. As 2025 begins, insiders indicate that this feature is not a priority for the company. The 'Media Manager' tool was designed to help identify copyrighted content, including text, images, audio, and video, and was intended to allow creators to set preferences regarding the use of their works. The announcement was made in response to extensive criticism over OpenAI's utilization of copyrighted material for training its models, like Sora, which generates content trained on billions of webpages and may produce near duplicates of copyrighted works. Despite the initial enthusiasm surrounding Media Manager, reports suggest it has not been a significant focus internally. A former OpenAI employee told TechCrunch, "I don't think it was a priority. To be honest, I don't remember anyone working on it." A contact closely coordinating with OpenAI further indicated that there have been no recent updates regarding the tool. Fred von Lohmann, a member of OpenAI's legal team who was involved in Media Manager, transitioned to a part-time consultant role in October. Italy slaps OpenAI with a €15M fine over GDPR breach in ChatGPT Since the announcement, OpenAI has not made any public statements regarding the progress of Media Manager. The company missed a self-imposed deadline to have the tool functioning "by 2025," leading to uncertainty about its future. OpenAI has implemented some ad hoc measures for creators to opt out of AI training but these have been criticized for being inadequate. A submission form for artists to flag their work for exclusion has been perceived as cumbersome, and webmasters can block data scraping but lack specific mechanisms for different media types. Experts question whether Media Manager can effectively resolve the legal issues related to intellectual property usage. Adrian Cyhan, an IP attorney, expressed skepticism about OpenAI's ability to navigate the complexities of creator protections. Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, noted that the burden of control may unfairly shift to creators who might not be informed about the tool's existence. OpenAI is currently involved in class-action lawsuits from various creators, including authors and media companies, who allege that their works were used without permission. The company maintains that its AI-generated outputs qualify as fair use by producing transformative works. OpenAI asserts that developing competitive AI models without leveraging copyrighted materials would be infeasible and emphasizes the need for a thorough approach to data sourcing and compliance with legal requirements.

Content Creators Worry OpenAI Won't Release a Tool That Promised to Protect Their IP

But one thing it didn't release, according to news site TechCrunch, was a long-promised tool that would allow creators to specifically exclude their content from being used by OpenAI to train its AI models. Worse than that, though, is the fact that OpenAI allegedly didn't consider the tool an important thing to work on. OpenAI first promised the Media Manager tool back in May 2024, around the time its large-language model training methods drew scrutiny, criticism and lawsuits -- including one from major newspapers that alleged copyright infringerment. It would specifically "identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video" so that creators could make their intentions clear across "multiple sources." The idea is that the tool would let creators flag each piece of their work to either explicitly allow OpenAI to use that material to train its AI systems, or bar it from doing so. The idea was to placate critics who were worried that OpenAI was abusing creators' content willy-nilly, using intellectual property without permission, and possibly shield the company from further IP-related legal challenges. The issue is quite straightforward: if a creators' work is used to train a generative AI model, like OpenAI's tools, then the unique qualities that the creative's skill has embedded in their work is now "known" by the AI model. If you asked OpenAI to write, say, in the style of a famous writer whose work has been assimilated in this way, the AI can thus do so. This capability continues to trigger complex discussions about intellectual property ownership, and has led to several high-profile lawsuits, including one by the The New York Times.

Exclusive: OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025

Back in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in -- or excluded from -- its AI training data. But 7 months later, this feature has yet to see the light of day. Called Media Manager, the tool would "identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video," OpenAI said at the time, to reflect creators' preferences "across multiple sources." It was intended to stave off some of the company's fiercest critics, and potentially shield OpenAI from IP-related legal challenges. But people familiar tell TechCrunch that the tool was rarely viewed as an important launch internally. "I don't think it was a priority," one former OpenAI employee said. "To be honest, I don't remember anyone working on it." A non-employee who coordinates work with the company told TechCrunch in December that they had discussed the tool with OpenAI in the past, but that there haven't been any recent updates. (These people declined to be publicly identified discussing confidential business matters.) And a member of OpenAI's legal team who was working on Media Manager, Fred von Lohmann, transitioned to a part-time consultant role in October. OpenAI PR confirmed Von Lohmann's move to TechCrunch via email. OpenAI has yet to give an update on Media Manager's progress, and the company missed a self-imposed deadline to have the tool in place by 2025. AI models like OpenAI's learn patterns in sets of data to make predictions -- for instance, that a person biting into a burger will leave a bite mark. This allows models to learn how the world works, to a degree, by observing it. ChatGPT can write convincing emails and essays, while Sora, OpenAI's video generator, can create relatively realistic footage. The ability to draw on examples of writing, film, and more to generate new works makes AI incredibly powerful. But it's also regurgitative. When prompted in a certain way, models -- most of which are trained on countless web pages, videos, and images -- produce near-copies of that data, which despite being "publicly available," are not meant to be used this way. For example, Sora can generate clips featuring TikTok's logo and popular video game characters. The New York Times has gotten ChatGPT to quote its articles verbatim (OpenAI blamed the behavior on a "hack"). This has understandably upset creators whose works have been swept up in AI training without their permission. Many have lawyered up. OpenAI is fighting class action lawsuits filed by artists, writers, YouTubers, computer scientists, and news organizations, all of whom claim the startup trained on their works illegally. Plaintiffs include authors Sarah Silverman and Ta Nehisi-Coates, visual artists, and media conglomerates like The New York Times and Radio-Canada, to name a few. OpenAI has pursued licensing deals with select partners, but not all creators see the terms as attractive. OpenAI offers creators several ad hoc ways to "opt out" of its AI training. Last September, the company launched a submission form to allow artists to flag their work for removal from its future training sets. And OpenAI has long let webmasters block its web-crawling bots from scraping data across their domains. But creators have criticized these methods as haphazard and inadequate. There aren't specific opt-out mechanisms for written works, videos, or audio recordings. And the opt-out form for images requires submitting a copy of each image to be removed along with a description, an onerous process. Media Manager was pitched as a complete revamp -- and expansion -- of OpenAI's opt-out solutions today. In the announcement post in May, OpenAI said that Media Manager would use "cutting-edge machine learning research" to enable creators and content owners to "tell [OpenAI] what they own." OpenAI, which claimed it was collaborating with regulators as it developed the tool, said that it hoped Media Manager would "set a standard across the AI industry." OpenAI has never publicly mentioned Media Manager since. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that the tool was "still in development" as of August, but didn't respond to a follow-up request for comment in mid-December. OpenAI has given no indication as to when Media Manager might launch -- or even which features and capabilities it might launch with. Assuming Media Manager does arrive at some point, experts aren't convinced that it will allay creators' concerns -- or do much to resolve the legal questions surrounding AI and IP usage. Adrian Cyhan, an IP attorney at Stubbs Alderton & Markiles, noted that Media Manager as described is an ambitious undertaking. Even platforms as large as YouTube and TikTok struggle with content ID at scale. Could OpenAI really do better? "Ensuring compliance with legally-required creator protections and potential compensation requirements under consideration presents challenges," Cyhan told TechCrunch, "especially given the rapidly-evolving and potentially divergent legal landscape across national and local jurisdictions." Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of Fairly Trained, a nonprofit that certifies AI companies are respecting creators' rights, believes that Media Manager would unfairly shift the burden of controlling AI training onto creators; by not using it, they arguably could be giving tacit approval for their works to be used. "Most creators will never even hear about it, let alone use it," he told TechCrunch. "But it will nevertheless be used to defend the mass exploitation of creative work against creators' wishes." Mike Borella, co-chair of MBHB's AI practice group, pointed out that opt-out systems don't always account for transformations that might be made to a work, like an image that's been downsampled. They also might not address the all-to-common scenario of third-party platforms hosting copies of creators' content, adds Joshua Weigensberg, an IP and media lawyer for Pryor Cashman. "Creators and copyright owners do not control, and often do not even know, where their works appear on the internet," Weigensberg said. "Even if a creator tells every single AI platform that they are opting out of training, those companies may well still go ahead and train on copies of their works available on third-party websites and services." Media Manager might not even be especially advantageous for OpenAI, at least from a jurisprudential standpoint. Evan Everist, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney specializing in copyright law, said that while OpenAI could use the tool to show a judge it's mitigating its training on IP-protected content, Media Manager likely wouldn't shield the company from damages if it was found to have infringed. "Copyright owners do not have an obligation to go out and preemptively tell others not to infringe their works before that infringement occurs," Everist said. "The basics of copyright law still apply -- i.e., don't take and copy other people's stuff without permission. This feature may be more about PR and positioning OpenAI as an ethical user of content." In the absence of Media Manager, OpenAI has implemented filters -- albeit imperfect ones -- to prevent its models from regurgitating training examples. And in the lawsuits it's battling, the company continues to claim fair use protections, asserting that its models create transformative, not plagiaristic, works. OpenAI could well prevail in its copyright disputes. The courts may decide that the company's AI has a 'transformative purpose," following the precedent set roughly a decade ago in the publishing industry's suit against Google. In that case, a court held that Google's copying of millions of books for Google Books, a sort of digital archive, was permissible. OpenAI has said publicly that it would be "impossible" to train competitive AI models without using copyrighted materials -- authorized or no. "Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens," the company wrote in a January submission to the U.K.'s House of Lords. Should courts eventually declare OpenAI victorious, Media Manager wouldn't serve much of a legal purpose. OpenAI seems to be willing to make that bet -- or to reconsider its opt-out strategy.

OpenAI's AI Training Opt-Out Tool for Creators Might Be Delayed

It was said to let creators exclude their work from AI training OpenAI, in May, announced a new machine learning (ML) tool that could enable creators to specify whether they wanted OpenAI to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models on their content or not. Dubbed Media Manager, the tool was said to identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and videos across multiple sources and could reflect creators' preferences. However, the company has yet to launch the tool, and as per a report, the development and release of Media Manager is not a priority. According to a TechCrunch report, the AI firm does not view the tool as an important project internally. Unnamed people familiar with the matter told the publication that it was likely not a priority for OpenAI and that nobody was working on it. Another unnamed source reportedly highlighted that while the tool was discussed in the past, there have not been any recent updates on it. Additionally, TechCrunch was told by the company that a member of its legal team who was working on the AI tool, Fred von Lohmann, was transitioned to a part-time consultant role in October 2024. These developments potentially indicate that the AI tool is not part of the company's short-term roadmap. Notably, it has been seven months since the first mentions of Media Manager. The AI tool was the company's way of providing creators a way to exclude their copyrighted content from being used to train OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). The company also has a form-based process that creators can use to tell the ChatGPT maker to remove any copyrighted material from its AI model's training data. However, it is a cumbersome process where complainants are required to list every item of their content and describe it for the AI firm to take action on it. Media Manager, instead, would use AI and ML processes to auto-detect content across websites and other sources and would cross-check with the names of the creators who have opted out of AI training. Several domain experts reportedly expressed concerns over the efficiency of the AI tool and highlighted that even giant platforms such as YouTube and TikTok struggle with content identification at scale. Others have reportedly criticised OpenAI's Media Manager for putting the burden of opting out on creators who might not even know about such an AI tool.