Hollywood heavyweights support new rights standard for AI systems
A new rights standard aims to protect works, identities, and characters from unauthorized AI use. Numerous Hollywood stars support the initiative.
Cate Blanchett founded RSL Media together with Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds, and Eckart Walther.
(Image: Lev Radin/Shutterstock.com)
Actress Cate Blanchett has launched the non-profit organization RSL Media, which aims to establish a consent standard for AI usage. It is intended to inform AI systems in a machine-readable format whether and under what conditions protected works, personal characteristics, and other rights may be used.
RSL Media describes its functionality as a kind of traffic light system: usage by AI systems, such as for training, generation, or imitation, can be permitted, permitted only under certain conditions, or prohibited. The specifications of the so-called “RSL Human Consent Standard” are already publicly viewable but have not yet been finalized.
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In addition, RSL Media plans a publicly accessible register. There, not only creatives and artists, but fundamentally all people, can verify their identity and specify for the four rights areas – works, identity, characters, and brands – whether and under what conditions AI systems may use them.
The approach is deliberately very broad and includes songs, films, books, art, and photos, as well as names, likenesses, voices, movements, protected fictional characters, and logos, trademarks, and design features. The information will be automatically translated into machine-readable signals. The register is scheduled to go online in June, but interested parties can already reserve a consent ID.
From Web Standard to AI Rights Framework
“AI can’t respect rights it can’t see, and this means human consent is virtually invisible in this new digital era,” says Nikki Hexum, co-founder and CEO of RSL Media. This is precisely where the initiative comes in. The standard’s co-author, James Everingham, describes the project as an infrastructure that aims to translate consents and usage rights into a system-wide usable format that can be processed by different platforms and AI systems.
The initiative is supported by, among others, Javier Bardem, George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren, Steven Soderbergh, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson, as well as by Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition.
RSL Media builds on the older standard RSL 1.0 from the RSL Collective but is an independent non-profit organization with a different focus and a significantly expanded approach. RSL 1.0 was intended to go beyond the existing robots.txt: While the latter primarily signals to crawlers whether they are allowed to access certain content, RSL 1.0 allows rights holders to additionally provide machine-readable terms of use and licenses for web content, for example for AI training or paid use. With the “RSL Human Consent Standard,” RSL Media is now extending this principle to underlying rights objects such as works, identities, characters, and brands, without binding them to a specific file, website, or platform.
The initiative is initially a technical standardization attempt, not a legally binding requirement. How effective the standard will be in practice depends on whether AI providers, platforms, and infrastructure companies actually read, respect, and technically enforce the signals.
(olb)
