In a recent pivot on intellectual property protection, OpenAI has moved from preemptively trying to prevent deepfakes to opening the flood gates and putting the responsibility on the individual being deepfaked, while also backing government bills that would put the responsibility of removing deepfakes on the platforms to which they are posted. It is a clear move to remove their liability while also avoiding shouts from the right that “freedom of speech” is being limited (though, freedom of speech only applies to those institutions with government involvement so those far right voices are idiots, but we already knew that). There is the turn — So how does a public figure or an individual protect themselves now? You could use a service like CopyrightSlap.com and whack-a-mole each occurrence. It is not a full solution, but it helps with removal (which, unfortunately, may be a necessary thing going forward). But better, you can also …
Go to OpenAI’s “Report Content” Form (click right here) and request that OpenAI removes your image from their training outputs. There is fine print, as in any copyright or intellectual property reporting, that “If you are reporting a public figure depiction, you must be the person depicted or an authorized representative of that person to make this report.” But it is a place to start. And why does it say “public figure”? Because unless you have enough images or videos online that were stolen in AI data training sets, the output won’t be able to create an image of you by name in a prompt.
This form seems to be designed primarily for reporting inappropriate content or content that violates local laws. However, given the fact that OpenAI images and Sora videos aren’t always watermarked (rarely are they), the use-case for finding a piece of content online and knowing it was created by OpenAI and then reporting it in this form is a bit of an absurd workflow. Step two (identifying it came from OpenAI) is probably a near impossible thing for the average Internet users to be able to know.
All that to say, please share this post and the link, and start the good fight.
PS Gen AI image “Report Content” brought to you one of the few things I’ve found Gen AI art generators useful for … “make it out of felt”.
