Ask HN: Is anyone working on an opt-in alternative to the LAION image dataset? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone working on an opt-in alternative to the LAION image dataset?

2 pointsdrusepth14 comments

There's a lot of discourse around the LAION dataset right now, including some active lawsuits against Stable Diffusion. Regardless of whether it turns out to be "legal" or not, there are also a lot of people against the collection for ethical or other reasons.

I've been looking around for anyone trying to collect a dataset of opt-in images and/or with consent from their creator, but either my Google-fu is finally failing or it doesn't seem like anyone's working on such a LAION alternative.

This seems like a huge opportunity to solve a problem that adds a lot of risk to anyone looking to use generative AI for images in their own projects/business, and could potentially have a huge impact on the public's sentiment towards AI.

So... is anyone working on an image dataset that was built with some form of consent, opting in, or other more legal/ethical means to collect these images?

Have you seen this website, which features opt in/out service?

- https://haveibeentrained.com/

And the related HN post:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843477

Hmm,

After a quick search I can't find very much in the way of actual company/university/project data on the site, nor can I find any clear back-references to LAION or SD or other parties. I should be finding this sort of thing easily if this site was legitimately set up by academics, FLOSS, or people who are otherwise related to SD.

I've seen several scam sites preying on artist's fears. How do we know this one is legitimate?

Information is easily found on link I provided, but here’s direct link:

https://spawning.ai/About

Feel free to directly contact LAION too, since the two projects are working together.

I mean, well, that's one of the first places I looked! And on that specific link, Ctrl-F LAION got me 0 hits.

This seems to -at best- be an unaffiliated well-meaning initiative that no-one is actually currently subscribing to? Unless you have separate information not provided by the site (eg. perhaps you know some of the creators?)

I swear I'm not normally quite so suspicious; but the amount of misinformation and noise on generative AI that is out there at the moment is so large that I've had to adjust my priors.

> “ We partner with Laion, who built these datasets, to remove those links.”

Which is from the text of the “I” for information link at the top of the OP link; which is where the above link is found; as in if you found that link, then you should have seen that text.

Again, feel free to contact Laion.

I will accept that they make that claim in one place.

However, there is no backreference from LAION, and LAION explicitly states that they are not associated with similar sites:

( from https://laion.ai/faq/ )

  > I found a dataset containing images while searching on the internet. What about   copyright then?

  > Any dataset containing images is not released by LAION, it must have been reconstructed with the provided tools by other people. We do not host and also do not provide links on our website to access such datasets. Please refer only to links we provide for official released data.

So this is probably LAIONs answer, or close enough to it that I don't feel a further need to directly contact them.

Do you have any statement or evidence that might be more specific than this blanket denial?

(Edit: specifically [ laion site:haveibeentrained.com ] returns 1 google hit, while [ haveibeentrained site:laion.ai ] returns 0 hits , Many references to haveibeentrained are found in source texts that are not particularly friendly about laion. )

(Edit2: I just gave haveibeentrained.com a random photo that I took this afternoon, and that -therefore- couldn't possibly be in the LAION dataset. It found a large number of near-matches. This could be somewhat misleading to some people).

(Edit 3: TL;DR of this thread: I have encountered several sites that have made similar claims. I suspect they can't all be telling the truth at the same time. LAION makes a blanket denial about being associated with anyone like this. Therefore my assumption now is that possibly none of them are telling the truth. To refute this assumption, we would need some sort of 2nd or 3rd party positive evidence to the contrary. This might include such things as having the specific claim be corroborated by LAION, or by a known LAION associate. I am somehow doubtful that they would actually do that here though, as that would seem contradictory to the LAION FAQ. )

Again, contact LAION.

Why? The LAION FAQ says they're not associated with such sites.

In the end that's clear enough I think.

Where?

https://laion.ai/faq/

Find it little odd how concerned you are, yet refuse to take actionable steps and instead engage in ultimately meaningless exchange with a random stranger on the internet.

Let’s assume you are right and LAION has no relationship to the project, if you’re concerned, should not contact them to get an official statement and share it on HN at the very least.

You know -on second thought- maybe you have a point.

I've mailed LAION and I'll let you know what they say as well.

It's weekend, so I don't think we'll get an answer soon. I'll still post my findings here if/when I get one.

for background:

Right now in some corners of the internet there seems to be some sort of anti-ai-generation campaign raging and people are getting bullied.

I never got a reply to my E-mail, sadly. :-(

I hadn't seen that! It's a great step in the right direction, although as I understand it it's more of an opt-out system for LAION rather than its own new dataset, correct?

Think you’re underestimating complexity of getting opt-in rights to billions of photos. LAION’s image dataset is simply a list of URLs and metadata, it’s not providing the images.

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