Cate Blanchett has launched a new nonprofit, RSL Media, aiming to make human consent visible to artificial intelligence by creating a machine‑readable standard that tells AI systems when and under what conditions they may use creative works, personal identities, fictional characters and brands. The organisation’s “RSL Human Consent Standard” and a publicly accessible register are designed to signal to AI whether use is permitted, permitted with conditions, or prohibited — a system the group likens to a traffic light — and the register is scheduled to go live in June, with consent IDs already available for reservation.
RSL Media says the standard will cover a broad swath of rights objects: songs, films, books, artwork and photos, plus names, likenesses, voices and movements, protected fictional characters, logos, trademarks and design features. The rules are intended to be translated into machine‑readable signals that AI developers, platforms and infrastructure providers can read and act on during tasks such as model training, content generation and stylistic imitation. The specifications for the RSL Human Consent Standard are already publicly viewable, the group says, although they have not been finalised.
The organisation plans a public register where “not only creatives and artists, but fundamentally all people,” can verify their identity and set consent parameters across four rights areas — works, identity, characters and brands — specifying whether and under what conditions AI systems may use them. Interested parties can reserve a consent ID now; RSL Media says the intention is to make those settings uniformly discoverable so different systems don’t have to each negotiate separate licences or permissions.
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RSL Media builds on the earlier RSL 1.0 standard developed by the RSL Collective but operates as an independent non‑profit with a wider remit. Whereas RSL 1.0 sought to go beyond robots.txt — which simply tells web crawlers whether they can access certain files — by providing machine‑readable terms of use and licence information tied to web content, RSL Media’s Human Consent Standard extends the principle to the underlying rights objects themselves rather than binding permissions to particular files, websites or platforms. James Everingham, a co‑author of the new standard, described the project as infrastructure to “translate consents and usage rights into a system‑wide usable format that can be processed by different platforms and AI systems.”
The initiative has attracted high‑profile backing from actors and creators including Javier Bardem, George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Helen Mirren, Steven Soderbergh, Kristen Stewart, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, and has support from organisations such as Creative Artists Agency and the Music Artists Coalition. Nikki Hexum, RSL Media’s co‑founder and CEO, summed up the rationale: “AI can’t respect rights it can’t see, and this means human consent is virtually invisible in this new digital era.”
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RSL Media frames the effort as a technical standardisation project rather than a legally binding regime. Observers note that its practical impact will depend on whether model builders, platforms and infrastructure companies adopt and enforce the signals. If broadly accepted, the register and machine‑readable consents could become a common infrastructure to help creators and rights‑holders assert control over how their work and identities are used by AI; if ignored, the standard risks remaining a voluntary tag system without legal force.
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