Artificial intelligence researchers said Friday they have deleted more than 2,000 web links to suspected child sexual abuse imagery from a dataset used to train popular AI image-generator tools.
The LAION research dataset is a huge index of online images and captions that鈥檚 been a source for leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
by the Stanford Internet Observatory found it contained links to sexually explicit images of children, contributing to the ease with which some AI tools have been able to produce photorealistic deepfakes that depict children.
That December report led LAION, which stands for the nonprofit Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, to immediately remove its dataset. Eight months later, LAION said in a blog post that it worked with the Stanford University watchdog group and anti-abuse organizations in sa国际传媒 and the United Kingdom to fix the problem and release a cleaned-up dataset for future AI research.
Stanford researcher David Thiel, author of the December report, commended LAION for significant improvements but said the next step is to withdraw from distribution the 鈥渢ainted models鈥� that are still able to produce child abuse imagery.
One of the LAION-based tools that Stanford identified as the 鈥渕ost popular model for generating explicit imagery鈥� 鈥� an older and lightly filtered version of Stable Diffusion 鈥� remained easily accessible until Thursday, when the New York-based company Runway ML removed it from the AI model repository Hugging Face. Runway said in a statement Friday it was a 鈥減lanned deprecation of research models and code that have not been actively maintained.鈥�
The cleaned-up version of the LAION dataset comes as governments around the world are taking a closer look at how some tech tools are being used to make or distribute illegal images of children.
San Francisco's city attorney earlier this month filed a lawsuit seeking to shut down a that enable the creation of AI-generated nudes of women and girls. The alleged distribution of child sexual abuse images on the messaging app Telegram led French on Wednesday against the platform's founder and CEO, Pavel Durov.
Durov's arrest 鈥渟ignals a really big change in the whole tech industry that the founders of these platforms can be held personally responsible,鈥� said David Evan Harris, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley who recently reached out to Runway asking about why the problematic AI image-generator was still publicly accessible. It was taken down days later.
Matt O'brien, The Associated Press
