It was ‘a matter of time’ before explicit pictures of kids were found in an AI training database—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, experts warn

Artificial intelligence has quickly become intertwined with consumers’ work and personal lives, with some Big Tech leaders lauding its potential for positive reverberations like nothing the world has ever seen. But a new Stanford study paints a bleak picture about what AI can do when safety measures fall through the cracks.  

On Wednesday, Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center published a report claiming it found more than 1,000 illegal images depicting child sexual abuse in an open-source database used to train popular image-generation tools like Stable Diffusion. LAION, the nonprofit that put the database together, used web crawling tools to create datasets with more than 5 billion links to online images, which companies can then pull from to use as training data for their own AI models.