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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Technology
Josh Taylor

Photos of Australian children used in dataset to train AI, human rights group says

photo of children's legs
HRW found children whose images were in the Laion-5B dataset, used by services such as Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Midjourney, were easily identifiable. Photograph: Ian West/PA

Photos of Australian children have been included in the dataset used by several AI image-generating tools without the knowledge or consent of them or their families, research by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

An analysis of less than 0.0001% of the 5.85bn images contained in the Laion-5B dataset, used by services such as Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Midjourney, found 190 photos of Australian children scraped from the internet.

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