OpenAI misses out on deadline for tool that lets creators opt-out of AI training

OpenAI is yet to provide a dedicated tool for creators to exclude their works from its AI training datasets, despite introducing newer AI models every quarter. In May last year, OpenAI said that it was developing a first-of-its-kind tool called Media Manager for creators and content owners. However, the ChatGPT-maker has missed its deadline of rolling out the opt-out mechanism by 2025 with no sign of its completion or launch.

“I don’t think it [Media Manager] was a priority. To be honest, I don’t remember anyone working on it,” an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee was quoted as saying.

Media Manager was announced as an in-development tool that would leverage “cutting-edge machine learning research” to “help us identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video across multiple sources and reflect creator preferences,” according to a blog post by OpenAI in May 2024.

“We’re collaborating with creators, content owners, and regulators as we develop Media Manager. Our goal is to have the tool in place by 2025, and we hope it will set a standard across the AI industry,” it further said.

Currently, creators can prevent their works from being used to train OpenAI’s models through a submission form. The content that is flagged through the form will be removed from future training datasets, as per OpenAI. The company has also said that its web-crawling bots will respect the decades-old web standard called robot.txt that is meant to prevent indiscriminate data scraping.