The Dataset Providers Alliance, or DPA, was formed on Wednesday, June 26, by leading providers of music, image, video, and other datasets for training artificial intelligence systems. 

According to Reuters, this trade group aims to advocate for ethical practices in sourcing data for AI training, focusing on the rights of individuals depicted in datasets and protecting intellectual property rights for content owners.

Among the founding members are prominent entities such as Rightsify from the US; vAIsual, specializing in image licensing; Pixta, providing stock photos from Japan; and Datarade, a data marketplace based in Germany. 

The alliance's establishment comes due to growing concerns over the use of copyrighted materials in AI training, which has led to legal disputes involving tech giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI, which are backed by Microsoft.

READ MORE: Nvidia Faces Lawsuit From Authors Over AI Use of Copyrighted Works

Why There's A Need for Ethical AI Use

Since the hype for AI, tech companies have faced lawsuits and scrutiny for using amounts of content scraped from the internet without proper consent, claiming legality while securing access to private collections to mitigate legal risks. 

VCPost reported that even the world's top company, Nvidia, is facing legal challenges for AI use of copyrighted works.

The DPA seeks to set ethical standards in the industry, prohibiting practices such as selling web-crawled text data or audio featuring individuals' voices without explicit consent.

Looking ahead, the DPA plans to advocate for legislation such as the NO FAKES Act and support transparency requirements for training data, similar to those proposed in the EU's AI Act and the US Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act. 

The group aims to outline its initiatives in a forthcoming white paper scheduled for release in July.

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