Just learned that some AI art generators were trained on millions of images scraped from DeviantArt without permission

I was reading an article on Ars Technica about how they found nearly 50 million images from DeviantArt in the LAION-5B dataset, and a huge chunk of those were from artists who never agreed to it. How do we even begin to unwind this mess when the data is already out there?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_chen8114d ago

Honestly I feel like people are blowing this way out of proportion. You mentioned "unwinding this mess" but is it really that big of a mess? These AI models don't copy images one to one, they learn patterns and styles like a human artist would. Also DeviantArt has always been a public platform where anyone can view and download images, so it's not like this was some private gallery. The whole "permission" thing gets tricky when you put your work on the internet for anyone to see. And let's be real, most of those 50 million images were probably not even that good or original to begin with. I just don't see how this hurts anyone in a concrete way.

alice92814d ago

Oh jeez, you really went there huh @blair_chen81. I actually just saw a thing about how one of those models reproduced a Getty watermark perfectly clear in a generated image. That's not exactly "learning like a human" if you ask me.

robinp8914d ago

Wow @blair_chen81, so do the artists get paid when their patterns get recreated for profit...