Deep in the quagmire of mounting legal challenges, OpenAI on Tuesday announced it was working on a tool that would give rights holders greater say over how their content is used.

From OpenAI's statement:

OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training. Over time, we plan to introduce additional choices and features.

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. 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.

Given the pace of AI development, and the disruption it is already causing, 2025 seems a long way off. But it is a complex problem. (TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers has more.)

The details will matter here. Firstly, it seems the onus will be on content owners to be proactive in making OpenAI aware of what they own (similar to the model of YouTube and others). As the number of AI tools and large language models grows, keeping on top of all the companies that might want to use your data will be no easy task (and that's just the good actors).

Second, it doesn't do much about all the material that has already been hoovered up by the training of these models.

The company also highlighted efforts it says it is making to better link through to sources of information when appropriate -- another gripe of content creators:

We’re continuously making our products more useful discovery engines. We recently improved source links in ChatGPT(opens in a new window) to give users better context and web publishers new ways to connect with our audiences. We’re also working with partners to display their content in our products and increase their connection to readers.

We’ve announced partnerships with global news publishers from the Financial Times, to Le Monde, Prisa Media, Axel Springer and more, to display their content in ChatGPT and enrich the user experience on news topics. More innovation is on the way. This content may also be used to train ChatGPT to better surface relevant publisher content to users and to improve our tools for newsrooms.

Will this be enough to fend off the legal challenges? Probably not. But it may go some way in convincing some publishers that collaboration may be more fruitful than confrontation.