Standardizing AI Preferences: Addressing Copyright Concerns in AI Training Data

To address copyright concerns arising from the use of internet content for training AI models, the IETF's newly formed AI Preferences Working Group (AIPREF) is working to standardize building blocks for expressing preferences on how content is collected and processed. Currently, AI vendors use a confusing array of non-standard signals (like robots.txt) to guide crawling and training, leading to a lack of confidence among authors and publishers that their preferences will be respected. AIPREF will define a common vocabulary to express authors' and publishers' preferences, methods for attaching this vocabulary to internet content, and a standard mechanism for reconciling multiple preference expressions. The working group's first meeting will be held during IETF 122 in Bangkok.