Is it a little ironic that someone who plays other people professionally is leading the charge in protecting people’s identities in the age of artificial intelligence? Sure, but it’s not like anyone else is doing anything about it.
On Tuesday, multi-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett announced the release of the Human Consent Registry, a new tool designed to help people control their likeness and how it can be used by AI systems.
The tool, which is being released by Blanchett’s non-profit RSL Media, allows people in the United States and the European Union to create a record of themselves that can be used to dictate how their identity can be interacted with by AI. “Your identity is your intellectual property, and every person should have a clear way to say what is, and is not, allowed to be used by AI systems,” the organization said in a press release.
How the registry works #
Upon creating an account, users will be presented with a form that asks them for biographical information like name and profession, as well as ways to mark their identity like a website or social media account. They then choose an “AI use consent” level, which is set up like a stoplight: Prohibited (red light), Permitted with Terms (yellow), or Permitted (green). Once completed, the person will have a Human Consent ID, which AI systems are able to check before including any part of a person’s likeness in their training data.
“Your identity is your IP in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it,” Blanchett said. “RSL Media’s free Human Consent Registry gives everyone a voice and a way to take action on AI permissions, helping to preserve and protect trust across the evolving AI landscape.”
According to RSL Media, this first tool will cover name, image, likeness, voice, movement and other signature or personal attributes for those who register through its platform. The organization plans to follow up the Human Consent Registry with similar simple registries for “Work,” “Characters,” and “Marks.”
Now, it should be noted that there does not appear to be any sort of enforcement method in place for making AI firms actually comply with this at this time, and you are turning over a lot of personal data to a third-party, so up beware. That said, it does build on the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, which has become a popular open protocol that was designed to establish AI usage rights and licensing terms for content. RSL has become a popular option for digital publishers, and with this new effort, RSL Media aims to extend that approach to human likeness.