Photo Credit: OpenAI (Sam Altman)
OpenAI teased a tool called ‘Media Manager’ to allow creatives and content owners to opt-out of AI research and training. But seven months on and as 2025 begins—insiders say the tool is not a priority for the company.
Back when the Sam Altman-led company teased the feature in May 2024, it said the Media Manager tool would provide a standard for creators, content owners, and regulators to opt-out of having their content used in AI training. “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,” the blog post announcing the feature reads.
“Over time, we plan to introduce additional choices and features,” the post continues. OpenAI announced the feature in response to criticism of its approach to hoovering up everything on the internet to train its models. OpenAI has argued in the past that it would be nearly impossible to create a model without copyrighted content present—which seems to be the case seven months on.
TechCrunch recently spoke with OpenAI insiders, who said the Media Manager feature just wasn’t a focus for the company—despite the announcement. “I don’t think it was a priority,” a former OpenAI employee said. “To be honest, I don’t remember anyone working on it.”
Another non-employee who coordinates work with the company told TechCrunch that OpenAI spoke about the tool in the past, but there have been no recent updates. The person who was working on Media Manager, Fred von Lohmann, is no longer with the company and has transitioned to a part-time consultant role.
OpenAI’s Sora model is capable of generating material that features copyrighted characters, works, and compositions. That’s because Sora is trained on billions of webpages, videos, and images that may contain copyrighted content.
The AI cannot distinguish itself when something has been sufficiently altered, so Sora users are often able to prompt for near exact matches of copyrighted content. OpenAI is currently fighting class action lawsuits from artists, writers, news organizations, and YouTubers who claim the company used their works without permission.
Since the blog post in May 2024, OpenAI has not publicly mentioned Media Manager at all.