Disturbing Study Finds AI Image Generators Trained on Child Pornography
A shocking new report has revealed that over 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse were in the AI database LAION. According to the Associated Press, the report externally validated about 1,000 images.
After the report’s release, LAION informed the AP that it was temporarily removing its datasets. In a statement, the LAION stated it “has a zero-tolerance policy for illegal content, and in an abundance of caution, we have taken down the LAION datasets to ensure they are safe before republishing them.”
Stanford Internet Observatory’s chief technologist David Thiel explained that the move is not an easy problem to fix. “Taking an entire internet-wide scrape and making that dataset to train models is something that should have been confined to a research operation, if anything, and is not something that should have been open-sourced without a lot more rigorous attention,” Thiel said in an interview.
On Wednesday, Stability AI said it only hosts filtered versions of Stable Diffusion and that “since taking over the exclusive development of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risk of misuse.”
In a statement, Stability AI said, “Those filters remove unsafe content from reaching the models. By removing that content before it ever reaches the model, we can help to prevent the model from generating unsafe content.”
German researcher and teacher Christoph Schuhmann, who created LAION, told AP earlier this year that one reason that the database was made widely accessible was so that a handful of powerful companies would not control the future of AI development.
“It will be much safer and much more fair if we can democratize it so that the whole research community and the general public can benefit from it,” he said.
Photo Courtesy: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/Supatman
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast,
