Is This Hollywood’s First Practical Solution to Control AI?

0:04This episode of The Town is presented by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, HBO Max presents DTF St. Louis. In this darkly comedic series, a love triangle between three adults experiencing middle-aged malaise leads to one of them ending up dead. Don't miss the series TV Guide is calling transcendent and audacious. DTF St. Louis is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now. This episode is brought to you by Holiday Inn by IHG. Everyone knows Holiday Inn, right? Or they think they do. Because though they have the same name, they've got a whole new energy. They kept the global icon status and upgraded pretty much everything else.

0:42We're talking modern rooms with real reset mode vibes, spaces that feel like your living room, just a little more low-key chic, and dining done right, from breakfast to dinner and drinks. Whether you're traveling for work or getting away for a minute, it's comfort that hits different. So yeah, Holiday Inn. It's a new day and a new stay. Book your next day at HolidayInn.com. It is Wednesday, June 3rd. The march of artificial intelligence into Hollywood has really ramped up lately. AI-generated films or AI-assisted films were all over the can market last month. Tribeca Film Festival just scheduled what's being called the first full-length live-action film generated by AI to be accepted at a major festival.

1:22and last week Amazon hosted a big AI filmmaking symposium called AI on the Lot where they greenlit three fully AI animated shows for Prime Video. That's just a few examples but amid it all there's still a really big fear around town that the models helping to create these films are just helping themselves to anything and everything they can find online. We've discussed the legal framework for copyright protection in this context on a previous show you can find that on the feed But protecting the names, images, and likenesses of actors and other known people from AI exploitation is a separate and pretty urgent issue.

2:00And to that end, an announcement last month caught my eye. It was for a nonprofit called RSL Media, which is helping to provide consent frameworks for AI use in creative works, including name, image, and likeness. The way it works is they use something called the RSL Human Consent Standard. This is a free public registry, which is going to launch June 24th and allow anyone to declare their AI permissions. Yes, no, sometimes you will control what you want. After that, it turns that consent into a signal that machines can read. So if you're registered there, you can potentially get paid when your IP rights are used.

2:39Although this is just a registry, it's not an enforcement mechanism. It's an interesting concept, and one of the co-founders is Cate Blanchett. It's also got support from her agency, CAA, as well as other CAA clients like George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, many, many more. Blanchette, in announcing the initiative last month, she called it, quote, the industry's first practical solution where people everywhere, not just public figures, can assert control over how their work is used by AI. Okay, lots of questions there. Namely, how is this going to work, practically speaking? and why would an AI company deal with a rights organization like this?

3:16So I asked Nikki Hexham, the co-founder and CEO of RSL Media, to come on the show and explain. Today, it's a new front in the battle to protect artists' rights from AI and what you, Hollywood person, can do to safeguard your own image. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:38Okay, we are here with Nikki Hexham, who is the co-founder and CEO of RSL Media, and hopefully a new force in the world of AI. Welcome, Nikki. Hi, thank you for having me. I wanted to have you on the show because I think it's interesting what you are doing amid this barrage of headlines that we are seeing. I feel like the push to AI has really ramped up, even in the past couple weeks, just in the number of projects that were at Cannes. Amazon had this big event this past week called AI on the Lot, where they basically brought in a bunch of filmmakers and journalists and executives and explained how they're going to start incorporating AI into their content output.

4:26Everywhere you look, there is some new AI initiative within the industry. And you are among a, I would say, small group of people that are pushing back on this or at least asking for a seat at the table. So could you just explain to me what RSL Media is and what you guys are trying to accomplish? Yeah. So RSL Media is the consent layer for the internet or for AI error that gives all people, artists, rights holders, studios, basically anyone, a way to say what they allow and what they don't allow for AI to use. How an AI system can use their identity. We have four main pillars that we cover, identity, marks, works, and characters.

5:20And so we built this because this layer doesn't exist in the internet right now. AI just kind of sucks in like a vacuum everything that it can see online and then generates and uses it to train models. And for us, we are not anti-AI. We are just very much pro-consent. And so we built an infrastructure layer that we felt was missing in the internet to allow people to say what they were okay with and what they didn't want to happen. So lots of questions. And let's get to the infrastructure first. What does this entail? You're launching a new product in June. So like, what is this database? Who participates?

6:01Why should they participate? And then finally, we'll get to the question of what leverage you actually have to force or to invite AI companies to participate in this. But give us the infrastructure first. So right now, like I said, the bots pull in everything. There is no machine-readable shared language, right? We have human language. We have human laws. We have contracts. We have databases that are proprietary and private. And all of this different rights information is scattered in a billion different places. It's also very reliant on humans saying, hey, don't do that. here's my contract saying not to and us going back and forth.

6:42So building a system that allowed a machine to read that like this at internet scale was, or building an infrastructure to allow that was really necessary if we don't want to always be reactive, right? We're always in this situation where we're playing whack-a-mole right now against machines. And so how do you flip that was really our mission. How do we say what needs to exist in order for that system to kind of not exist? Okay, so let's get into the details here. Let's use Kate Blanchett as an example. She's your co-founder and a big advocate on this issue. What would you do with Kate Blanchett's 30, 40-year body of work here?

7:28Yeah, so basically, RSL Media only is needed or works for people who have an online presence, right? Every movie Kate's done is probably available online. You can go to YouTube and see a hundred different videos of her. Yes. The tar clips are everywhere. Yeah. Her voice is used everywhere. Right. And so what RSL does for someone like Kate is it says, I'm Kate Blanchett. This is how I'm verifying who I am through someone like Kate. It might be with an agency or a lawyer or a SAG after a union. Yeah. Or her guild. I mean, we'll get to the guilds here. Yeah. And, you know, we would verify that that was Kate.

8:06And then Kate would very easily, or her representative who she chose, would very easily be able to say, Kate's voice is not to be trained or generated on. So it's a red light for her. We use a stoplight system. Green light is go. Yellow light is yes with these terms. And then red light is no. So maybe Kate was a no and it was a red light. But then she might have her image might want to be okay. She might be okay with something being out there. Right. For a fee. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe she wants to get paid, right? So whatever those terms are and whoever she is delegated to set them for her and control them and receive compensation for them would be in charge of that and making sure that for what all of these different issues, her work, her likeness, her identity, the way she moves, her style, she would be able to consent to them being used or not.

9:00So for Kate, she would say, no, I don't want my likeness used. I don't want my voice used unless you're going to pay me because this is my profession. Right. And this is hypothetical. I don't know actually what Kate would want. That is very much up to her. No, I get it though. But so each individual would have a profile essentially on your platform and it would interact automatically with any bots that are scraping or looking for information to train on. Yeah, a tag that allows the bot to know immediately what it's supposed to do with that. But then that leads to the next question. Why in the world would any of these AI companies agree to this?

9:39Well, I think that right now there's a lot of companies that actually do want to do the right thing. There's also probably a bunch that don't, right? Okay. There's probably some that really do. There's a lot of large companies that really don't want the exposure of a$1.5 billion lawsuit, right? Which is, I mean, these are happening all the time. And different countries around the world as well. The EUAI Act is, you know, 7 % fine or something crazy. But for some of these companies, that's hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. Although, to be fair, there's no solid legal framework yet that is preventing companies from using copyrighted material to train models that is still evolving.

10:25Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is part of that process, right? This is what we've built is absolutely a part of that. Everything has to start somewhere. It doesn't just magically appear. And so, and to be clear that name, image and likeness rights are different from copyright and trademark, and it's a whole legal framework, but you are trying to encompass everything here. Yeah, I think when, I mean, for the music industry is a good example of this. They've had likeness in contracts for a really long time. It was so they could print your face on a t-shirt and sell the shirts or put up promotional materials.

11:00That definition I think has changed and I think is still being defined right now. What is the person's likeness? These are very abstract things that typically things like trademark does not deal in the abstract, right? It is a very specific thing that you are trademarking. But I think the AI error has an internet speed has just changed how these things are working at all. And so we are now playing catch up to something that has moved much further ahead than the law has, you know, I mean, some people are still wrapping their heads around what this means. We don't have the laws. It's kind of the Wild West.

11:39I mean, this is early Napster and Spotify days. Things are changing rapidly right now. Well, and that's my question is, do you have the legal firepower behind you to implement this rule and to get these companies in line? So I think what we're, I mean, we're building a standard and by standard, a standard is a shared language. So HTTP is a standard. Nobody thinks about where that came from. It's totally taken it for granted. I don't know what this podcast is running on, but RSS is a standard. Our team members built that. Standards are really things that kind of are existing in the world because they were adopted.

12:18And people are just saying, yeah, that's a good idea. We should use that. It's a step in the right direction. So our goal was to build a standard, something that was free, interoperable for everyone to use no matter where they were on the globe. So it's not an enforcement mechanism. It's merely the standard that the enforcers will use to get what they want. Yeah. I mean, serious companies need trust. They need legal certainty. They need enterprise customers. They need operational clarity. They're dealing right now with real lawsuits. Regulation is changing, right? It's being drafted. There's a lot of customer pressure.

12:55There's public pressure. All of these things are starting points for a conversation. So being able to say, we checked that, like the EU AI Act, for instance, has a bunch of compliance things in it that say, you need to be able to check this. If you're an AI company, you need to show us that you checked this. That system doesn't exist right now, right? To show that you actually were trying to do the right thing doesn't exist. That's just a completely missing infrastructure layer. And that's the one we're hoping to fill. So you're Craig and Craig is a budding digital media star slash podcaster. Should Craig immediately go to you guys and create a profile and make sure that he's starting down the right path?

13:37Should any actor or public person be working with you? Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of them are already. And how does one get in touch with you? Right now, it's through people that they I mean, you can get a hold of us on our website. We are not hard to get a hold of. You can go to our website. You can reserve a consent ID. You can have your agency or your lawyer or your union reach out to us. Yeah. I mean, eventually you have to automate it, right? Because the volume that you want to work at would require some kind of automation. How do you do this at scale? So we have built out what we call trusted partners, which is places like CAA or unions or large organizations that we can implement with that team on what would work for them, where they can do kind of an umbrella over their entire organization that turns it from an opt out to an opt in.

14:32So if I'm CAA, for instance, and I put up my RSL umbrella, everybody under that organization is now a no automatically unless they have chosen to opt in. And CAA has done that. I noticed that CAA, the agency, is a partner of yours and many of the high profile sponsors are CAA clients. Yeah. Yeah, we got really lucky, actually. I think most of the people that we talked to happened to be represented by them, and they were really supportive and I think see the value of having a standard. There's a lot of private options right now. They're all very expensive. What are those private options? I don't even know what they're called.

15:13I know that there's a couple of big companies that are doing things where you go and you get scanned. Oh, right. You have this secret deposit box where all of your IP is stored, and if anyone wants to use it, they have to go through your gatekeepers. Yeah. And some of these big companies have those situations already put out. That just doesn't do anything for the rest of the world, right? Right. If that's behind a private system, and I'm a bot and I have no way to get that, and Tom Cruise is sitting right in front of me, am I going to go through the trouble of getting through this system when I have no idea how to do that?

15:47Yeah. Yeah. And what is the position towards you guys of the guilds like SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild? Are you working with them? Do they have their own initiatives that they are doing? They have their own standard that they want to implement? As far as I know, we've talked to them. We are really, really wanting to work with them. We want them to tell us how to build the right thing. What is it that we need to do that makes it easier? I mean, they advocate for their clients, right? They advocate for their members. Their members, yeah. Yeah. And so making sure that we're making it easier for them, that their workflow is easy, is really important to us.

16:26They've done really good work. I mean, it's really important that they participate, right? Instead of waiting for a system to just show up and scrambling and then trying to change it, which I think is something I see in Hollywood a lot is, oh, well, that's just happening and we'll just pivot when we need to. This is a really rare time in history where you actually can participate in the system that's being built. Yeah. It's like being around at the inception of file sharing and coming up with some kind of a accepted world where you could not just go on to Napster or any of the other clones and share whatever.

17:06There was a format for not doing that. Yeah. I mean, this is it, right? This is that time. This is the time where I've seen it's actually really heartbreaking to me, especially in music. I'm seeing a bunch of people kind of just give up and say it's too late. You know, it's already here and it's too late. And that breaks my heart because it isn't. Right. There is so much that is going to change within the next six months to a year. This episode is brought to you by Hulu. Praised as Hulu's fresh spin on crime comedy, Deli Boys returns with an all new season. Philly's favorite corner store criminal family, the DARS, are back with more money, more problems, and more stars, including Fred Armisen, Andrew Rannells, and Kumail Nanjiani.

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19:06good for them good for them trying something but we're not and we're just not gonna do that like that's my big fear here is a that you can't get to scale where it matters and b that they're just like not gonna deal with you i mean they're gonna deal with somebody right i mean that they are maybe i can't imagine um of the the mass of 25 and under year olds who are literally booing at commencement speeches saying, okay, I would not, I just, I don't see a future where, and it's really what we're asking for that hard. We're saying consent matters. This is a human right, basically. Why? Yeah, but it's money.

19:49Can you imagine? It's essentially, they would consider it a tax, a tax on what's out there on the internet. I think this opens markets. I think this completely, every serious organization, every serious company has rules and regulation. And that typically allows you to make money. So for me, this open markets, it removes exposure, which is ridiculously large for some of these companies. We just saw today CNN sued perplexity. There are a bunch of these lawsuits going on, a lot of them in the publishing world, but also in the video world as well. Disney and Comcast are involved in litigation already with some of these companies.

20:34And I did see that there is a new bill in Illinois, an AI safety bill that was actually supported by OpenAI and a couple of these companies. They're trying to get in on the regulation so they have a seat at the table and can help shape it. And maybe they would endorse some kind of an IP protection mechanism that they helped shape. Yeah. And I mean, we would love for them to come help shape this standard. It needs to be interoperable. It needs to be workable at scale. The only standards only work if they're adopted. It's not going to work if it's not adopted by AI companies. Right. It just isn't.

21:17We've been reaching out to AI companies. We've started conversations with them. I think this idea that everybody is a bad player is wrong. Oh, you haven't listened to this show. Everybody does what's in their own best interest. They do. They absolutely do. And humans are kind of the worst at this, right? We always, if there is a way to exploit something, we will do it immediately. Have you ever met David Zasloff? Let's talk about your own best interests here. Yes. But I also believe, I mean, the internet is a perfect example of this. When it first started, it was just pornography and scamming people, the worst of the worst, right?

21:58And then we developed regulations and rules, and we kind of used it differently. And I think we have a pattern of doing this in society. AI, I don't think, is any different. At first, when it came out, we did what we could with it, which was the worst. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is if you look at the music business as a comp here and what was going on in the early 2000s with the Wild West of file sharing, it did take some big company to step in like Apple and say, not only are we going to honor these copyrights, we're going to create a business around it where these labels can partner with us to sell their music.

22:34and we could argue about whether it was a fair price for a certain price and create a business around this act of file sharing. And then lo and behold, streaming becomes the music industry. Yes. Yes. I mean, I, I'm, this is the exact same pattern, right? Which is why it's so hard for me to hear some of my music friends to be like, it's too late. And I'm like, no, it is not. Do you envision some version of an iTunes store or an app store where you, AI company, you can click on CAA and for a fee, you can use their clients that have opted in to train your model? Maybe for somebody. That's not our plan.

23:19Okay. What is your plan to make this sustainable? We are not involved in money. Right. You guys do not have a profit motive here. No, we don't. We are a public benefit company. We have filed for a 501c3. We are literally trying to be the most boring standard on the planet. So the company that creates the app store for actors, they can use your standard to make billions of dollars. Yeah. And any other company can because it's a standard, right? Standards are used by anybody. Hopefully, the unions are the people who implement this as a way to collect fees, right? I mean, SoundExchange is an example of what happened when the world changed in music.

24:00Yeah. SoundExchange collects revenue on behalf of song owners, and it was a digital creation. It was not part of the old regime. Yeah, exactly. And I think we're going to see something similar like that happen for identity. and and and i think the unions or these large companies like ca who've been doing this for a really long time would probably be well positioned to do that at least for their clients right yeah wme the other rival agency has made some noise in washington on this issue and they and have you worked with them as well are you talking to them we reached out to them a lot and we didn't ever get a response.

24:39Oh, maybe they'll hear this and they'll get in touch. Or they probably have their own rival that they're working with. And that's the thing is getting everyone to coalesce around one standard is really tough. It is. I mean, and that's the truth about standards, right? I haven't, as far as I know, there isn't a lot of other standards. There's a lot of other private companies who are, and I don't have a problem with those companies, but I think in order for those companies to truly be successful, you still need a standard. Otherwise it's a mob bracket, It's like, hey, you got a nice face. I'll keep it safe for you for 20 bucks a month.

25:11And then you don't pay that month. And the next thing you know, you're like doing things you never would have done before. It's the public storage of the internet. Yes. Oh, man. So, I mean, that is really important. And I still think there's a lot of room for private companies to do that. I mean, for people who can afford to do extra things, then great. They should be able to do that. That's not our lane. our lane is is that consent shouldn't be paywalled that this is a layer of the internet that just has to exist in order for these markets to be open in order for these things to actually work craig are you in are you are you getting in touch i will opt in i i will have i'll use the yellow light option you know craig just wants to get paid that's all he cares about i do have a question though nikki let's say you're kate blanchett and you choose the red light option how does it work Obviously, she, like you said, not only are her movies everywhere and TV shows and everything, but it's like clips of her on every app that's ever been made, photos of her, her voice is everywhere.

26:12How does it actually work where if she chooses the red light option, how can you guarantee that her entire likeness, everything she's ever done that's on the most random website you've ever heard of is not being used? Yeah. So, I mean, the standard itself is not, it doesn't invent a new legal right, right? Or it doesn't automatically really enforce anything. It makes existing rights and permissions and what someone chooses easier for machines to see and hopefully respect, right? Enforcement still very much depends on the law, and those laws are being written right now. They also depend on contracts and whatever the platform rules are and the terms of service, the facts of each situation, the real life.

26:54I mean, these laws exist in our life right now. For some reason, when we moved them online, we created a system that says none of those rights apply to this new lane. So that's all stuff that's coming right now. And I don't think it's because we're not going to have those rights. Again, it's just because they're slower. So we just create that notice and that audit trail that helps show this was when somebody said they didn't want this. This is where it was published, when it was checked, any time that happened. And that hopefully builds that foundational layer that legislators and everyone else kind of needs to build on top of to create the system that we all, I think, want, which is, you know, to be able to decide if our face ends up on a naked body doing things we would never do or not.