PeterBronez

PeterBronez , 4 days ago

@along_the_road

“These were mostly family photos uploaded to personal and parenting blogs […] as well as stills from YouTube videos"

So… people posted photos of their kids on public websites, common crawl scraped them, LAION-5B cleaned it up for training, and now there are models. This doesn’t seem evil to me… digital commons working as intended.

If anyone is surprised, the fault lies with the UX around “private URL” sharing, not devs using Common Crawl

#commoncrawl #AI #laiondatabase

PeterBronez , 4 days ago

@along_the_road what’s the alternative scenario here?

You could push to remove some public information from common crawl. How do you identify what public data is unintentionally public?

Assume we solve that problem. Now the open datasets and models developed on them are weaker. They’re specifically weaker at identifying children as things that exist in the world. Do we want that? What if it reduces the performance of cars’ emergency breaking systems? CSAM filters? Family photo organization?

PeterBronez , 2 days ago

@kent_eh exactly.

The alternative is “if you want your content to be private, share it privately.”

If you transmit your content to anyone who sends you a GET request, you lose control of that content. The recipient has the bits.

It would be nice to extend the core technology to better reflect your intent. Perhaps embedding license metadata in the images, the way LICENSE.txt travels with source code. That’s still quite weak, as we saw with Do Not Track.