5 ms·

Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set

54 points by kranke155 4y ago

TT-392 4y ago
Did I miss something while reading this. If the dataset is just a bunch of urls, then surely you can find out who is hosting the image and go after them?
bell-cot 4y ago
I wonder if Getty Images knew about this problem, when they decided to ban AI-generated images ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32926073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32926073 ). Even if they were somehow legally in the right...selling rights to "AI generated" images which included lightly-filtered versions of someone's private medical photos could be a PR nightmare.
yrgulation 4y ago
“ai artist”. how does one qualify as such a title i wonder? simply running an “ai art” tool and producing “art” or?
- sideshowb 4y ago
  Sounds reasonable.
- afiori 4y ago
  "X artist" generally means "someone that produces Xs that are art" or "someone that uses X to make art". given the context it is likely the latter.
autoexec 4y ago
> "Just because they scraped it from the web doesn’t mean it was supposed to be public information, or even on the web at all." You can't have "private medical images" that are also easily found and being made available to anyone at no cost 24/7 on the public internet. Maybe we need a new word to replace "private" when we're talking about images that are very much public but we wish weren't.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  The images weren’t meant to be publicly accessible in the first place.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    In this case, the images were publicly available and therefore were no longer private, and that's why they got scraped and ended up in the training data. Maybe she didn't intend for those images to become public, maybe she wishes they weren't public, but they were accessible and being accessed by the public. Describing highly public images as "private" is just strange. Maybe "personal" would be better?
    - rngname22 4y ago
      It's hard to tell if you're splitting hairs over language purposefully, but it's clear from the context that the use of the term 'private' here means 'intended to be private / legally required to be private / accidentally public'.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        If it were just the click-baity headline I wouldn't be bothered (as much), but the article repeatedly refers to these public images as being private > "Late last week, a California-based AI artist who goes by the name Lapine discovered private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 referenced in the LAION-5B image set" > "...it bothers her that private medical images have been baked into a product without any form of consent or recourse to remove them." > "Ultimately, Lapine understands how the chain of custody over her private images failed" The article keeps claiming that private photos are included in a AI product, but the fact is that these were public photos when they entered the product. In fact, it's only because they were public that they were included. The article attempts to frame this situation as "LAION steals private photos and won't take responsibility" but that's not only a lie, it ignores the real issue. If there is a problem here it is that these photos were made public in the first place when they shouldn't have been, at least according to the person photographed. It's entirely unclear what rights she has to these photos or to control how or where they are used, or that there was any illegal activity from any party in making those images freely available to the public. Even if the LAION data set never existed it wouldn't change the fact that those images have been made public and have been being repeatedly copied/shared/viewed by all manner of people for any number of purposes. Calling out this one AI project is ridiculous. There are some good discussions to be had about if it's okay to use certain types of material in training datasets, but it doesn't help anyone to grossly misrepresent the issue. I feel bad for people who suddenly realize that images of them are public when they didn't think that would happen, but there is notably zero information in this article about what exactly caused these images to get posted to public websites, who published them making the images public, and what rights the publishing party had when they did it. Discussions on how to keep data that should be private from being made public, or making people aware that data they expect should be private may not be private at all is a lot more productive than hit pieces trying to help claw back images that have already been made public or spreading FUD about new and powerful technologies that only make use of already public data.
cheald 4y ago
The story here seems to be that images which should have been protected by their custodian (the doctor's practice) and never online ended up somewhere on the public web, no?
Arbortheus 4y ago
I suppose this is where the notion of "once you've put something on the internet you can never delete it" comes from. If you don't want people to download your private medical records, don't leave them lying around for anyone to see.
drooby 4y ago
When I went down a conversational thread with GPT-3 the bot took on the persona of a young man studying therapy in university. I asked the bot what inspired it to peruse therapy and it said “a traumatic event in my past” inspired it to help others. I asked what this traumatic event was and it said he (it) tried to kill himself… It did get me wondering if gpt3 somehow had access to like therapy transcripts or something… alternatively though - I’m sure there have been like a million Reddit threads that trained it to say something like that.

54 points by kranke155 4y ago

Did I miss something while reading this. If the dataset is just a bunch of urls, then surely you can find out who is hosting the image and go after them?

bell-cot 4y ago

I wonder if Getty Images knew about this problem, when they decided to ban AI-generated images ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32926073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32926073 ). Even if they were somehow legally in the right...selling rights to "AI generated" images which included lightly-filtered versions of someone's private medical photos could be a PR nightmare.

yrgulation 4y ago

“ai artist”. how does one qualify as such a title i wonder? simply running an “ai art” tool and producing “art” or?

sideshowb 4y ago
Sounds reasonable.
afiori 4y ago
"X artist" generally means "someone that produces Xs that are art" or "someone that uses X to make art". given the context it is likely the latter.

autoexec 4y ago

> "Just because they scraped it from the web doesn’t mean it was supposed to be public information, or even on the web at all." You can't have "private medical images" that are also easily found and being made available to anyone at no cost 24/7 on the public internet. Maybe we need a new word to replace "private" when we're talking about images that are very much public but we wish weren't.

wodenokoto 4y ago
The images weren’t meant to be publicly accessible in the first place.
- autoexec 4y ago
  In this case, the images were publicly available and therefore were no longer private, and that's why they got scraped and ended up in the training data. Maybe she didn't intend for those images to become public, maybe she wishes they weren't public, but they were accessible and being accessed by the public. Describing highly public images as "private" is just strange. Maybe "personal" would be better?
  - rngname22 4y ago
    It's hard to tell if you're splitting hairs over language purposefully, but it's clear from the context that the use of the term 'private' here means 'intended to be private / legally required to be private / accidentally public'.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      If it were just the click-baity headline I wouldn't be bothered (as much), but the article repeatedly refers to these public images as being private > "Late last week, a California-based AI artist who goes by the name Lapine discovered private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 referenced in the LAION-5B image set" > "...it bothers her that private medical images have been baked into a product without any form of consent or recourse to remove them." > "Ultimately, Lapine understands how the chain of custody over her private images failed" The article keeps claiming that private photos are included in a AI product, but the fact is that these were public photos when they entered the product. In fact, it's only because they were public that they were included. The article attempts to frame this situation as "LAION steals private photos and won't take responsibility" but that's not only a lie, it ignores the real issue. If there is a problem here it is that these photos were made public in the first place when they shouldn't have been, at least according to the person photographed. It's entirely unclear what rights she has to these photos or to control how or where they are used, or that there was any illegal activity from any party in making those images freely available to the public. Even if the LAION data set never existed it wouldn't change the fact that those images have been made public and have been being repeatedly copied/shared/viewed by all manner of people for any number of purposes. Calling out this one AI project is ridiculous. There are some good discussions to be had about if it's okay to use certain types of material in training datasets, but it doesn't help anyone to grossly misrepresent the issue. I feel bad for people who suddenly realize that images of them are public when they didn't think that would happen, but there is notably zero information in this article about what exactly caused these images to get posted to public websites, who published them making the images public, and what rights the publishing party had when they did it. Discussions on how to keep data that should be private from being made public, or making people aware that data they expect should be private may not be private at all is a lot more productive than hit pieces trying to help claw back images that have already been made public or spreading FUD about new and powerful technologies that only make use of already public data.

cheald 4y ago

The story here seems to be that images which should have been protected by their custodian (the doctor's practice) and never online ended up somewhere on the public web, no?

Arbortheus 4y ago

I suppose this is where the notion of "once you've put something on the internet you can never delete it" comes from. If you don't want people to download your private medical records, don't leave them lying around for anyone to see.

drooby 4y ago

When I went down a conversational thread with GPT-3 the bot took on the persona of a young man studying therapy in university. I asked the bot what inspired it to peruse therapy and it said “a traumatic event in my past” inspired it to help others. I asked what this traumatic event was and it said he (it) tried to kill himself… It did get me wondering if gpt3 somehow had access to like therapy transcripts or something… alternatively though - I’m sure there have been like a million Reddit threads that trained it to say something like that.