AI image-generators are being trained on explicit photos of children, a study shows

Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence image-generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse, according to a new report that urges companies to take action to address a harmful flaw in the technology they built. LAION, which stands for the nonprofit Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, said in a statement that it “has a zero tolerance policy for illegal content and in an abundance of caution, we have taken down the LAION datasets to ensure they are safe before republishing them.” While the images account for just a fraction of LAION’s index of some 5.8 billion images, the Stanford group says it is likely influencing the ability of AI tools to generate harmful outputs and reinforcing the prior abuse of real victims who appear multiple times. New versions of Stable Diffusion have made it much harder to create harmful content, but an older version introduced last year — which Stability AI says it didn’t release — is still baked into other applications and tools and remains “the most popular model for generating explicit imagery,” according to the Stanford report. How it happens Without proper safeguards, some AI systems have been able to generate child sexual abuse imagery when prompted to do so because they’re able to produce novel images based on what they’ve “learned” from the patterns of a huge trove of real images pulled from across the internet, including adult pornography and benign photos of kids. Some systems have also been trained on actual child sexual abuse imagery, including more than 3,200 images found in the giant AI database LAION, according to a report from the Stanford Internet Observatory.