A German photographer discovered 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, German stock photographer Robert 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.