What it is
IPTC and the PLUS Coalition have added machine-readable data-mining permission fields to major image and video metadata standards so rights holders can say whether works may be used in training datasets. Those fields push AI-use controls down to the asset level, complementing site-level approaches like robots.txt or domain-level preference headers.
Limitations
Asset-level metadata only works when intermediaries preserve it, and public adoption is harder to measure than crawler-level signals.
Evidence trail
Examples
ExifTool write command Source
IPTC shows this command as a concrete way to attach a PLUS Data Mining value to a video file.
exiftool -XMP-plus:DataMining="Prohibited for Generative AI/ML training" example-video.mp4 Embedded metadata field Source
The same IPTC guidance uses this Data Mining value for a generative-AI opt-out.
XMP-plus:DataMining = "Prohibited for Generative AI/ML training"