English

A Survey of Web Content Control for Generative AI

Information Retrieval 2024-04-04 v1

Abstract

The groundbreaking advancements around generative AI have recently caused a wave of concern culminating in a row of lawsuits, including high-profile actions against Stability AI and OpenAI. This situation of legal uncertainty has sparked a broad discussion on the rights of content creators and publishers to protect their intellectual property on the web. European as well as US law already provides rough guidelines, setting a direction for technical solutions to regulate web data use. In this course, researchers and practitioners have worked on numerous web standards and opt-out formats that empower publishers to keep their data out of the development of generative AI models. The emerging AI/ML opt-out protocols are valuable in regards to data sovereignty, but again, it creates an adverse situation for a site owners who are overwhelmed by the multitude of recent ad hoc standards to consider. In our work, we want to survey the different proposals, ideas and initiatives, and provide a comprehensive legal and technical background in the context of the current discussion on web publishers control.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2404.02309,
  title  = {A Survey of Web Content Control for Generative AI},
  author = {Michael Dinzinger and Florian Heß and Michael Granitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.02309},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:42:22.594Z