The IPTC, in association with the PLUS Coalition, has submitted a response to the National Science Foundation’s reequest for Information on the Development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan.

The full response can be downloaded here:

IPTC_PLUS_ A Proposal for Communicating Data Mining Rights from Copyright Holders to Artificial Intelligence Developers – for US National Science Foundation

Our response can be summarised as follows:

1. On behalf of our memberships, IPTC and PLUS respectfully suggest that existing copyright law is sufficient to enable licensing of content to AI platforms. A “fair use” provision does not cover commercial AI training. Existing United States copyright law should be enforced.
2. IPTC and PLUS Photo Metadata provide a technical means for expressing the creator’s intent as to whether their creations may be used in generative AI training data sets. This takes the form of metadata embedded in image and video files. This solution, in combination with other solutions such as the Text and Data Mining Reservation Protocol, could take the place of a formal licence agreement between parties, making an opt-in approach technically feasible and scalable.
3. It is true that our technical solutions would also be relevant if the US government chose to implement an opt-out based approach. However, this does not currently protect owners’ rights well due to the routine activity of “metadata stripping” – removing important rights and accessibility metadata that is embedded in media files, in the misguided belief that it will improve site performance. Metadata stripping is performed by many publishers and publishing systems – often inadvertently.
4. As a result, we can only recommend that the US adopts an opt-in approach. We request that the US government ensures that metadata embedded in media files be declared as a core part of any technical mechanism to declare content owner’s desire for content to be included or excluded from training data sets.

Content creators are a core part of the US economy and have a strong voice. We agree with their position, but we don’t simply come with another voice of complaint: we bring a viable, ready-made technical solution that can be used today to implement true opt-in data mining permissions and reservations.

As reported in Social Media Today, Pinterest has started using IPTC embedded Photo Metadata to signal when content in “Image Pins” has been generated by AI.

Reports started in February that Pinterest had started labelling AI-generated images. Now it has been confirmed via an official update to Pinterest’s user documentation.

In the Pinterest documentation, a new section has recently been added that describes how it works:

“Pinterest may display a label in the foreground of an image Pin when we detect that it has been generated or modified with AI. This is in accordance with IPTC standard for photo metadata. We’re working on ways to expand our capabilities to better identify GenAI content in the future through additional technologies.”

Here is a sample image posted by a Reddit user showing what the tag looks like in action. The referenced image contains a Digital Source Type of “trainedAlgorithicMedia” using the IPTC NewsCodes URIs, as we recommend in the IPTC Photo Metadata User Guide section on Applying Metadata to AI-generated images.