Oscar winner Cate Blanchett wants you to tell AI ‘hands off’

BRUSSELS, June 24 — Cate Blanchett brought Hollywood starpower to Brussels yesterday as she launched a free tool to give people the right to decide how their image can be used by AI firms.

Blanchett announced the Human Consent Registry was live at the European Parliament also attended by Hollywood directing heavyweight Steven Soderbergh.

The public tool available online will allow anyone to register how they want their identity — name, image, voice, likeness, movement and/or other personal attributes — to be used by artificial intelligence systems.

They will have three options: allowed, allowed with terms, or prohibited.

“Human consent is not an impediment to progress. Human consent does not diminish the struggles and the joys of technological innovation or inhuman creativity,” Blanchett said at the event in the parliament’s library.

She insisted the issue did not just affect public figures like herself, but for anyone who has been photographed “or simply lived some part of their life online”.

The registry has been launched by RSL Media, co-founded by Blanchett, a non-profit organisation focused on ensuring consent in AI use.

RSL Media hopes AI companies will voluntarily consult the registry.

Blanchett has been a staunch proponent of protecting rights in the age of generative artificial intelligence.

She was among over 800 creatives including fellow actor Scarlett Johansson as well as director Guillermo Del Toro, who published an open letter accusing AI giants of “theft” in January this year.

Hosting yesterday’s event was EU lawmaker Eva Maydell who hailed the new tool.

The registry “represents an ambitious attempt to turn the principles into practice and make consent more accessible and feasible, to make rights more transparent, and to make trust more scalable”, Maydell said.

Soderbergh hailed “a template that we think really works for both the companies and the creative community”.

Storytelling

The European Parliament has garnered international attention after the EU became the first in the world to regulate AI so comprehensively.

Maydell had been one of the key EU negotiators of the landmark AI Act.

Top parliament official Sabine Verheyen said the EU needed “robust concept mechanisms so creators retain control over their own image, voice” and more.

Blanchett and Soderbergh weren’t the only Hollywood figures in town to talk AI.

Acclaimed American film-maker Darren Aronofsky told an audience of creatives at the EU parliament in another event hosted by MEP Maydell how his AI studio Primordial Soup was using the technology for storytelling.

Aronofsky felt that, while the models often created “incredible” images, they lacked the “power of emotion and the power of our humanity”.

With that discovery, he said he realised “we need to figure out how to use this incredible technology” and “turn them into storytelling machines”. — AFP