Personal photos of children posted online are being used to train artificial intelligence tools without their parents' knowledge or consent, an analysis from Human Rights Watch found.
LAION-5B does not contain the actual images, just links to where the images are stored and accompanying captions. But Han said some of the URLs in the dataset had children’s names and information that made it easy to trace their identities. Some photo links found in the LAION-5B dataset were from sources like personal blogs, posts by schools and family photographers hired to capture personal portraits. The report said there were some images that had been uploaded a decade before LAION-5B was even created.
The report mentioned YouTube’s terms of service prohibit scraping or harvesting information that might identify a person, including an image of their face. After Han’s first report detailing the photos found in the dataset of children in Brazil, the German nonprofit organization that manages LAION-5B confirmed her findings and pledged to remove the image data. However, current AI models can’t unlearn the data they’re trained on, Human Rights Watch said.