LAION trains Robert Kneschke photos without consent 

German stock photographer Robert Kneschke discovered that his photos had been used to train the LAION-5B dataset, raising questions about copyright protections from AI datasets and systems, and the ethics of the dataset's eponymous developer.

Having asked ​​LAION to remove his work from their training data, Kneschke received a demand for 887 euros (USD 980) from LAION's law firm Heidrich Rechtsanwälte for what it called an 'unjustified claim' on the basis that it 'only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet.' 

The fracas put the spotlight on the practices and ethics of LAION, a German-based non-profit dedicated to the 'democratisation' of machine learning research and applications that provides datasets to train major commercial text-to-image and video-generating models such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Google’s Imagen. 

Kneschke had used the website Have I Been Trained? to find out whether any major datasets had been trained using his images. 

➕ April 2023. Kneschke filed a lawsuit against LAION for copyright infringment.

Legal, regulatory 👩🏼‍⚖️

• Robert Kneschke v. LAION

Research, advocacy 🧮

• Robert Kneschke (2023). LAION-Verein droht Urhebern, die ihre Daten aus KI-Trainingssatz nehmen wollen mit Schadensersatzansprüchen

• Campaign for AI Safety (2023). Copyright Cases Against AI Labs

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkapb7/a-photographer-tried-to-get-his-photos-removed-from-an-ai-dataset-he-got-an-invoice-instead

• https://petapixel.com/2023/04/26/ai-image-dataset-demands-money-from-photographer-who-requested-removal-of-his-photos/

• https://www.diyphotography.net/ai-used-photographers-photos-for-training-then-slapped-him-with-an-invoice/

• https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Was-darf-KI-Stockfotograf-und-KI-Verein-streiten-um-das-Copyright-8984836.html

• https://www.profifoto.de/szene/notizen/2023/02/21/laion-droht-kneschke/

• https://mezha.media/en/2023/05/01/a-photographer-was-fined-nearly-1-000-when-he-asked-to-have-his-photos-removed-from-an-ai-database/

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712617