Report says photos of kids posted online, even privately, are used to train AI [Video]

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.

The human rights advocacy group said even photos that were posted to various platforms under strict privacy settings were being scraped from the internet as part of a larger dataset being used to teach popular AI programs.

Human Rights Watch researcher Hye Jung Han examined a small percentage of a dataset called LAION-5B, which is an openly accessible collection of 5.85 billion multilingual image-text pairs. The data is derived from internet archives accumulated by Common Crawl, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that publicly provides copies of data scraped from the internet for research and analysis.

LAION-5B is a popular dataset used by AI developers to train their models.

Han said she found 190 identifiable photos of Australian children, including some from the country’s Indigenous tribes, while analyzing …