By Davey Alba and Rachel Metz
A massive public dataset used to build popular artificial intelligence image generators contains at least 1,008 instances of child sexual abuse material, a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory found.
LAION-5B, which contains more than 5 billion images and related captions from the internet, may also include thousands of additional pieces of suspected child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, according to the report. The inclusion of CSAM in the dataset could enable AI products built on this data — including image generation tools like Stable Diffusion — to create new, and potentially realistic, child abuse content, the report warned.
The rise of increasingly powerful AI tools has raised alarms in part because these services are built with troves of online data — including public datasets such as LAION-5B — that can contain copyrighted or harmful content. AI image generators, in particular, rely on datasets that include pairs of images and text descriptions to determine a wide range of concepts and create pictures in response to prompts from users.
In a statement, a spokesperson for LAION, the Germany-based nonprofit behind the dataset, said the group has a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal content and was temporarily removing LAION datasets from the internet “to ensure they are safe before republishing them.” Prior to releasing its datasets, LAION created and published filters for spotting and removing illegal content from them, the spokesperson said.Christoph Schuhmann, LAION’s founder, previously told Bloomberg News that he was unaware of any child nudity in the dataset, though he acknowledged he did not review the data in great depth. If notified about such content, he said, he would remove links to it immediately.
A spokesperson for Stability AI, the British AI startup that funded and popularized Stable Diffusion, said the company is committed to preventing the misuse of AI…
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